Comments are a great part of the intraweb. It's what separates this kind of media from Print, Radio and Television. Comments allow you the reader to put in your 2 cents about a topic/post/article. Blogs take advantage of comments because authors love to get feedback on their posts. I know I do! Habari, the blogging system I use has a commenting system built in, but I am a huge fan of threaded comments, that is the ability to reply to a specific comment in a threaded style, thus separating it from other comments about the post. Disqus is a great commenting system that allows you to do exactly that. You fill out the same info you do with many other commenting system, your name, email (which is never displayed to the web) and a URL should you choose to. Disqus also allows you to create an account should you want to have a fancy little avatar like I do. They also offer email notification if you want to subscribe to a thread or get an email if someone replies to a comment you've made. The Disqus site provides great step by step tutorials on how to integrate their commenting system into many popular blogging formats, including Tumblr, which is where I was first introduced to Disqus as Tumblr does not provide the ability to have comments by default.

With all that being said, comment away. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject.

Habari is great in that it is a rich and rewarding community of users and developers that are always adding cool new features and fun things. Included in the default list of plugins is a WordPress importer. As a former WordPress user, I thought it would be great to import my posts dating all the way back to 2004. Some of these posts I'm not so proud of, as they feature some pretty terrible lack of importance, grammar, capitalization and ya, basically good content. Despite this, I attempted to run the importer hoping to bring back my early days as a blogger. It worked for the first few hundred posts (I apparently had 686 posts in my database) but the importer then seemed to stall. Frustrated, I ended up removing my entire Habari install and database and started with a fresh and clean install of Habari. I meant to keep the four comments I had received, but neglected to do so. I have since decided it's probably just better to start nice and clean and look forward to new blogging. I might go back and manually import some of the highlights from my blogging in the past few years, but that sounds like something that would take a long time. Obviously I'm far too busy to do this. With the job that I don't have.

So along with my move to Habari as my blogging platform, I also have recently changed web hosting companies. For the past five years I was hosted with Suprass Hosting company. I really can't complain about the service I received, and while I enjoyed the hosting plan and features I had with them, during my attempt to install Habari I ran into a few issues. The first issue being that I lacked the more current version of PHP. PHP being a web scripting language that is used by many popular blogging platforms. It turns out that Surpass did support the newer version I needed, and I only needed to edit a few things in order to have it enabled. The second issue I ran into was even more of a geeky issue that may or may not mean anything to you. I wanted the ability to use the subversion repository that allowed me access to the cutting edge version of Habari. To do so, I need to have the ability to update my installed version of Habari using the subversion updating features. Basically this means, I wanted the ability to update my installed version of Habari quickly, without having to download the most recent and then upload it to my site. To do this I needed a special access to my site that is called SSH. Again, this is rather geeky, but it involves using some command line skillz and apparently the hosting plan I had with Surpass did not give me the ability to do these things. This made me upset, so I sought out a new host. One that would give me the features I desired. Along came Slicehost. Well it didn't exactly come to me, but after hearing about it from a few people I decided to check it out. Slicehost is a Virtual Private Server hosting company that gives users the ability to have their own "virtual" server without paying the expense of a real dedicated server. Slicehost is quite cool in that they gave me the option of choosing which Linux distribution I wanted to install and beyond that, I had to make everything else work. I went with Ubuntu 8.04, being that I was at least a little more familiar with Ubuntu than other Linux distributions. After getting that set up I had to do cool and geeky things like installing Apache web server software, setting up the DNS settings for my domain and get Habari up and running. I didn't realize how fun having my own server would be. I'm learning a lot and hope to continue to learn more about such things. It took me a while to get everything configured and up and running, but once it was I had quite a sense of accomplishment, since I did all the work.

I am quite the fickle user. I had a long time love with WordPress and used it for years, and only recently did I switch to Tumblr because of it's ease and simplicity. I then was presented with the beauty of Habari. Habari takes some of the best things from many blogging systems and makes it even better. I can go on forever about how cool I think it is. Needless to say, I think I'm moving on from Tumblr and will be a full time blogger via Habari

JudyCintron.com

My mom has a Tumblr now, with custom domain set up!