ClickComments Now Available in elsua – Plus a Few Other Changes

Tags: del.icio.us, social bookmarks, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Metablogging, ClustrMaps, Twitter, MyBlogLog, Flickr, widgets, elsua, WordPress, Plugins, ClickComments, Blog Comments, YouTube, Screencast

A couple of weeks back I was actually browsing through the Knowledge Management related bookmarks from del.icio.us and I bumped into a couple of them from different weblog posts that I have shared over here in the past, where next to the links themselves there was also a number of different comments indicating how heavy this weblog was to load up. That got me thinking and put me into the case of finding out what was actually causing the problem. And after investigating things a bit, I found out that most of the problems were caused by a number of the widgets I have been using for a few months now.

So instead of leaving those widgets hanging around as part of the template, I have gone ahead and removed most of them, at least, the ones that were creating the most problems when loading the page. If you are reading this weblog post from my syndicated feeds, you may not have noticed the change, but I have removed everything and just left ClustrMaps, my Twitter badge, MyBlogLog and my Flickr badge. The end result is that from now on, whenever you would try to load elsua.net it should load way way faster. At least, it loads twice or three times as fast as before, when the widgets were there.

But this weblog post is not just to let you all folks know about some of the different changes taking place over here. I would also want to share something else with you. Something that I have been enjoying myself in several other weblogs that I visit on a regular basis and which has helped improve the overall user experience of WordPress blogs. Yes, that is right. I am talking about one particular WordPress plugin that I have put together a few days ago already and which if you are reading this from a syndicated feed you may not have noticed just yet.

Check out ClickComments. A fine and very helpful plugin that is not only really simple to put together, but quite effective in what it tries to achieve: help weblog commenters share their thoughts on the stuff they read without not necessarily dropping a comment. On the contrary, just with a single click! Yes, that is right. A single click.

For a few days now, every time that I get to publish a weblog post over here you would be able to see a number of different icons underneath the weblog entry that you would be able to click on to rate the content of that particular weblog post in a number of different ways: cool stuff, inspired me, entertaining, write more, creative, insightful, touched my heart and great find! So not only would it be possible to make the overall experience a bit more enjoyable, but you would also be able to participate in the kind of content that I get to share over here. And all of that without leaving a comment, if you don’t want to, that is. You know that comments are more than welcome! Always. 🙂

Finally, I should probably mention how the good thing that I like about this particular WordPress plugin is not only how simple it is to set up, but also the fact that they have made use of YouTube to share a screencast of how it actually works. You can find the link for it over here, but for the sake of showing you how it works, so that you can start participating from it right away, here is the embedded version of the clip:

Very shortly, I will be sharing some further changes that I have made into the template and the actual content of the weblog, including some minor changes of the About page, which is just about to go through some major updates in the next few days, but that would be the subject for another weblog post.

Hope you get to enjoy ClickComments just as much as I do whenever I get to visit a number of WordPress blogs where I have seen it running already… Now, who said that blogging is boring, eh? 😉