The New Year comes with a change for BlueChampions blog. One look at the blog, you’ll know what are those changes but I wanted to introduce these changes to you with details and also explain why these are useful. I thought the best and easiest way to do this is probably through an FAQ style post. So here we go:

What has changed? The biggest change is with the comment section in this blog. There are wholesale changes which are long overdue. It might also appear that the colour scheme of the blog has changed but that’s to go with the comment section.

Why do we change now? Comment management has always been right on top of my agenda and that’s been the key reason why we have seen numerous templates and themes over the last 4 years. I’ve always been looking for an ideal, convenient, feature-rich comment section. Every change, including this one, has been a step in this direction.

What has changed in the comment section? Generally the comment section of a blog is governed by the php/css codes of the blog software/theme. The latest development in the blogosphere is the new softwares whose objective is to solely focus on comments sections and commenters’ interface and comfort. ‘Disqus’ is one such very popular software. Now the comments section of BlueChampions is powered by Disqus. As Disqus is a dedicated comment management system, there are a lot of changes and benefits for the comment section that would not have been technically possible otherwise.

What exactly are the changes in the comment section? Okay, now we get into the devil. There are some very key changes: (i) Commenters’ community (ii) Commenters’ profile page (iii) Commenters’ tracking & following (iv) Comment sorting/liking (v) Facebook/twitter integration (vi) Youtube integration  (vii) RSS support

Can you explain these changes please? That’s the very objective of this post! Here we go!

(i) Commenters’ community: We do have a strong and closely-knit community here at BlueChampions. We may not know each other or met each other but we do have some kind of togetherness here. Disqus allows us to have a community of commenters, whereby you’ll know each other member very well, you can follow the fellow commenter, you can track their comments. This way we all can stay closer and know each other much better.

(ii) Commenters’ profile page: Yes, each commenter will have his/her (are there any female readers in here?) own profile page. You can use this page to update your likes and dislikes around football, Chelsea or anything. This page is easily accessible by clicking the gravatar of the commenter. I remember this was something that Maysam was asking for but I couldn’t find the right solution until I found this.

(iii) Commenters’ tracking & following: You can track one or more particular commenters and view their comments in your profile box. This is quite similar to the following you would do in Twitter. I’m sure we all have certain commenters (for instance this old man JoseHoliday!) in whose comments we are quite interested and we don’t want to miss what they say. Tracking and following will help here.

(iv) Comment liking: A la Facebook. You can like others’ comments and your likes will be counted. In the BlueChampions community page, you’ll see the most liked commenters and such stuff based on this. It’s quite simple. If you like a comment, you only need to hit the ‘like’ button underneath it.

(v) Comment sorting: Traditionally in our blog, we have always had the oldest comment at the top and the newest at the bottom. Now, you’ll be free to sort the comments the way you want to with the drop down options. The default set up is now ‘newest at the top’ but as I said you can sort it the way you want to.

(vi) Facebook/twitter integration: Now you will be able to use your facebook/twitter or even open ID or yahoo ID to post comments in BlueChampions. I’m not sure if this feature is fully functional yet. I’m still working on this. If it works for you at any time, do let me know.

(vii) Youtube integration: This is a cool feature. When a commenter posts a comment with a youtube link, the thumbnail of this youtube video appears in the comment. Upon clicking it, you have compact window opening as a pop-up that plays the video. So you won’t have to leave the blog and you don’t have to go the youtube website at all. So this is youtube, integrated. Check this comment from Tremayne Craigg.

(viii) RSS support: Now the comments in the bluechampions blog are also available for RSS. You can subscribe to RSS feeds via email or using an RSS aggregator. I know this is really a long overdue feature but here it is.

Some visual references now. Let’s start with the comment input section:

Let’s go left to right, top to bottom. The first icons you see are the ‘I like this page’ icons. Pretty simple. You like or hate this particular article. Followed by gravatars of people who liked this article. Towards the top-right, you have some important icons. I’d have liked to see these as fairly big icons but leave that to me. The first icon (two men) is the community box. If you click this icon the BlueChampions Community box opens up. That has the list of members of the community, the most liked members, the total number of comments per member, new face etc (will see pic later). The Disqus icon next to this is just their ad box.

Let’s see how to view someone’s Profile. See the comment from ‘LampardAndTheBlues’. If you hover on his gravatar, you’d be reminded that if you click on it, you can see his Profile.

This is what a Profile looks like:

DanaBlue has yet write stuff about himself in the Profile, so we won’t see that stuff until he does. Now, look at DanaBlue’s Activity. See how neatly it groups up all his comments here. Also, notice the ‘FOLLOW’ icon. When you follow someone, their comments are visible in your Disqus dashboard.

Okay, let’s go back to the original picture.

Above the text box, on the left hand side again, you have the username that you have logged in as and the total number of comments you have posted in the post-Disqus era and the likes you have received. Then you have the text box where you type in the comments followed by the comment sort drop down at the bottom. You have four options of which ‘newest first’ and ‘oldest first’ are self-explanatory. ‘Best rating’ shows the most like comment on top and ‘popular now’ shows the most replied comment. This is followed by the links for RSS subscription for comments.

Now onto the comments section. See how I picked a nice comment to talk about this :)

In the above comment, if you click on Karma’s gravatar, you’ll open up his profile page where you can get to know more about Karma, provided he has registered (you haven’t yet, Karma!).

Towards the far right, you see this little ‘collapse’ icon that would collapse this comment. Under the comment you also have a ‘moderate’ and ‘flag’ icon. The moderate link is if you have moderator access so you can quickly deal with the manure and arse nonsense. The ‘flag’ link is for you to flag an objectionable post so it mails the moderators on that comment. Down right, you have the ‘like’ and the ‘reply’ buttons.

There are two ways to show the reply comments. One is a threaded method where the replied comment is added as a sub comment to the original comment (which is default right now). The other is to show them as flat but if the comment is a reply to another comment, next to the gravatar you can the texts ‘in reply to . . . ‘ so you know. I’m still trying to see if we can ‘quote’ like we used to.

Do remember that I’m not the technology kind. I had no idea of blogging softwares, php, css and such coding. It’s only after I started running BlueChampions, I slowly learnt bits and pieces of these things, by trial and error. So, the implementation of such features in the blog may not quite have a professional touch. I’m an amateur in these spaces, so go easy on me!

I’d also request you to explore this new system. There are a lot of little features here and there that I may not have touched upon. So please do explore it yourself. We have this page ‘Why Chelsea’ on the menu bar which talks about our stories on why we started following and supporting Chelsea. Some of the long timers didn’t know about this which is sad. All it takes is some exploring around, clicking all buttons and links to see what’s there. Don’t miss out on anything because you had not checked something out. Curiosity!

In order to avail most of these features, you need to be registered in BlueChampions Disqus. The registration process is the simplest I have seen and it takes about 10 seconds. Get registered and become a part of the BlueChampions Community.

Looking forward to seeing more and more of us joining the community! Cheers!