Intense Debate

November 1, 2008 · Comments

No, this has nothing to do with the Presidential election.

A while back I played with Disqus, a hosted blog comment management system. I like the idea of threaded comments and easier comment management/layout tools. In practice, I found Disqus to be a little klunky and so I removed it.

Then Automattic, the company behind WordPress, purchased Disqus’ biggest competitor: Intense Debate. They locked the software down to new sign-ups while they tweaked the code. I applied for a beta invite which just came through this morning. I may be imagining it, but there’s a certain extra level of trust now that it’s an Automattic product. It also now uses Akismet for spam filtering and it supports Gravatar images.

Intense Debate, like Disqus, allows you to import/export/sync your comments between their hosted system and your blog’s own server. So you can switch back and forth and not worry about losing anything already in your database (which you backup nightly anyway, right?) or on Intense Debate should you decide to switch back later.

The best part about systems like Intense Debate is that it links conversations together across the blogosphere. You can log into a single interface to follow/track your comments and the comments of others across multiple Intense Debate-enabled blogs. This is where I think Intense Debate will have the most value. As an Automattic product, I think it will eventually have better adoption than Disqus. The more blogs using Intense Debate, the better it will be in the long run.

It has some little bells and whistles, like a widget for displaying recent comments in a sidebar (you can see it already in mine) and a Feed Flare for adding comment counts to FeedBurner RSS feeds.

What I’m not seeing yet is a way of author highlighting my comments here.

So far, I think I like Intense Debate. It was even easier to install/configure than Disqus was, and the layout is less fussy. It took about an hour for my blog’s 3000+ comments to be imported. I’m not disappointed with the way the comments look and behave, and I haven’t had to touch a line of CSS yet. We’ll see how it goes as I leave it here for a while. Please let me know if it really sucks, okay? I have it set to just filter spam but not require any other moderation at the moment. I was approving all legitimate comments anyway.

I’ll be using this post to test, so if the comments seem a little funky here, that’s why.

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Love at first lick

October 30, 2008 · Comments

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Take a look at the love of my life.

The other guy is my husband.

Just kidding, honey. ;-)

I am not a dog person. Not that I don’t like dogs, especially small ones. But I never fancied myself the type that would treat a dog like it was a human member of the family. And then I met Chewii.

If you’re not one of those dog people, you probably want to stop now.

[click to continue…]

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My favorite Salesforce Winter ‘09 feature so far: functional email to Salesforce

October 6, 2008 · Comments

I already posted about Winter ‘09 based on the early preview notes. Now that the release is live, there’s one little tidbit buried in the release notes that’s worth pointing out.

Email to Salesforce using a custom email address (send or bcc to the address) is relatively new, and until now it was a bit crippled.

If the email address of the person whose record you wanted to attach the email matched, everything was hunky dorrie. But what happens if the person’s record had a different email address, or no email address recorded at all? Or, if you wanted to attach the email to a case or closed opportunity as well as the contact record? You had to do it manually after the activity record was already in Salesforce, usually by resolving an “unresolved” task and relating the record within the task.

Now in Winter ‘09, you can simply send your email as usual, then go back to the message, forward it to the Salesforce email address and add (ref: recordID1, recordID2, etc.) to the top of the body of the email. The release notes don’t specify a limit of how many records a single email can be attached to.

And you can set it so you get an email confirmation that the email was attached to the record, rather than having to go to the record directly to confirm.

Much better.

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Apple’s stock fell on a false rumor…who should get punished?

October 5, 2008 · Comments

So some guy posted on the CNN “citizen journalist” site (which if I remember correctly became a big thing after hurricane Katrina in 2005) that Steve Jobs had a heart attack. Some folks who have Apple stock read that and panicked, causing a big, temporary dip in Apple’s stock price. When the report was denied by Apple, the stock rebounded.

This weekend, I’ve been reading a lot about how the SEC is trying to track down the guy who did it. All fingers are pointing at him, and if he’s caught having shorted Apple stock, he’s going to go to jail. Yes, he deserves that.

But I have to wonder how much of the blame is with CNN, and if the SEC is going to hold the news giant accountable for any of this?

If a uniformed fireman walks into a crowded theatre and yells “Fire!” people are going to run and not ask any questions. If I walked into a crowded theatre and yelled “Fire!” dressed in my everyday clothes, yes some would run anyway. But I have to think that a few would sit for a few moments and wonder, “Why is that strange woman yelling fire? Where’s the fire? Is she kidding?” In the time it took for them to question my credibility, the truth would be revealed or more folks would be yelling fire too. If a fireman gave me a uniform to play dress-up, and I used it to yell “Fire!” in a theatre, yes I’d be in trouble for causing the chaos. But that fireman would also be at fault for irresponsibly violating the trust that the uniform represents by giving it away haphazardly.

CNN.com has earned a reputation as a go-to news source. Want to see if a Twittered rumor is real? Wait to see if CNN posts it. With that level of earned credibility comes responsibility, and they blew it. It doesn’t matter how many disclaimers are on the iReport site that the news is not filtered or edited. It doesn’t matter how easy or difficult it is to post a report. It’s still CNN. Had the rumor been posted at your average Mac rumor site, even one with high traffic that gets a lot of viral attention, I don’t think it wouldn’t have affected Apple’s stock price the way it did. Was there a reasonable expectation that the report was true simply because it was there on a CNN-owned site? Maybe.

iReport is a great idea. But CNN either has to own it and make sure it keeps the parent brand credible (moderate reports that break news, let everything else go) or they have to completely detach it from the CNN brand and sell it off.

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11 reasons I’m pretty happy right now

October 4, 2008 · Comments

Last year at this time Eric was getting ready for around 6 weeks of back-to-back international travel for work, we were driving 50 miles each way to get Laini to school and back, paying her $3-5K/month tuition with money we didn’t have (I love you, Mom, more than you can ever know), we just had a terrible resolution session with the school district and we were getting geared up to go to due process. Ugh.

It’s not quite a gratitude journal, but here’s some of what’s making me smile these days despite what’s going on in the world…

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