I’ve lost count how many times I’ve wanted to set up a personal site for blogging and what better time to initiate yet another attempt than on New Years (starting up a blog is actually one of my new year resolutions). I hope to keep the blog mostly with technical content with some personal touches (not that any of you care).
For the 5 people in the world curious on what’s going on the backend, here it is:
After looking at over a dozen (literally) blogging engines, I keep coming back to BlogEngine. It’s old, its had its issues, blah blah but hey, its a proven platform. In my defense: I did try to be a good Jedi but just like the umpteen programmers that had sworn to build their own blog, I eventually gave up and just decided to go with whatever that had the highest user base. I did retain my sanity though: it runs on ASP.NET (not a certain other scripting engine curiously named as a recursive abbreviation).
vs 
Comments are the heart and soul of any blog and “outsourcing” it to a 3rd party is all rage these days but depending on who you choose, you can either enjoy a smooth interactive spam-free blog or you’d be trading out the soul of your blog to the devil and he’s not always as charming as in the Supernatural series. I intensely debated (and I did initially set up IntenseDebate) but I decided to Disqus in the end (yes, pun intended). To be fair, I really like the default look and the reputation system of IntenseDebate. Since they’re both basically aimed at doing the same thing, I am just going to point out the differences that made me choose Disqus.
- Clicking on the name in IntenseDebate takes you to their IntenseDebate profile even if the user had entered his site. I know, silly reason but its a big turn of for me. I couldn’t find any way to change this behavior.
- No trackback or reaction support in IntenseDebate. I am still unsure about the trackback support. It looks like trackbacks are available for WordPress users but not for generic (unsupported) blogs. I am sure there’s definitely no reactions support or any similar concept in IntenseDebate.
- Disqus supports Yahoo! authentication. This is a very minor reason but kinda important for me as I expect a lot of users with Yahoo IDs on my blog.
- For the life of me, I couldn’t get the comments count link in IntenseDebate to work. Maybe I am just stupid but it always threw some lame JavaScript error. To be fair, I could’ve requested support and probably could’ve gotten this fixed. I’ve seen this issue happen to others and IntenseDebate fixed it for them. Again, a minor reason but just thought I’d throw out there.
- Disqus is way more popular than IntenseDebate. This is just my opinion and not a researched fact. I am always stumbling on to Disqus and I’ve never actually seen IntenseDebate on any site yet which is kinda ironic considering Automattic (creator of WordPress) acquired it over an year ago.
Somehow I think you'll be able to figure out these logos on your own :)
