Sorry all, it appears that between last nights bloggers drinks and this morning JS-Kit have switched us over to their Echo upgrade for comments which has effectively wrecked the hours of work I, along with the help of Bethyada and Stephanie, put into making comments appear seamlessly integrated and appears to no longer give you a link back to your own blog.
On the bright side the comments appear legible even if they don't look that tidy so I will get to work understanding Echo and seeing what I can do to improve the current state of affairs.
UPDATE
In true JS-Kit style the instructions for customising Echo were hopelessly techie assuming a huge amount of knowledge the average blogger does not possess. Given that Echo has munted the way our comments display I am pleased to report that I managed to turn Echo off and switch back to the previous format. Comments are back to normal.
On the bright side the comments appear legible even if they don't look that tidy so I will get to work understanding Echo and seeing what I can do to improve the current state of affairs.
UPDATE
In true JS-Kit style the instructions for customising Echo were hopelessly techie assuming a huge amount of knowledge the average blogger does not possess. Given that Echo has munted the way our comments display I am pleased to report that I managed to turn Echo off and switch back to the previous format. Comments are back to normal.
Good to hear, the other format was hideous.
ReplyDeleteThe fontsize in the combox could be a little larger though :)
Yes and the grey lines around the comment boxes and avatar and the blue greay panel behin the bold, italics, Underline, Undo/Redo and Hyperlinks needs to go too but at least its not that awful Echo layout.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, contemplating customising it was like starting from scratch again and I nearly had a panic attack until I worked out how to turn it off.
If you have any idea as to how I can enlarge the fontsize in the combox I'll happily do it.
I have just discovered, in all my other threads and interestingly not in this thread, that I now have two of every comment.... nooooooooo
ReplyDeleteI have been automatically moved to Echo and so far it seems okay. I dont get as many comments as you guys but is there any thing I should be wary of???
ReplyDeleteHi <span>Madeleine,</span>
ReplyDeletePlease note that this skin will soon become unsupported and switch to Echo as well.
Please don't hesitate to email support and ask them to help you with the color customization of Echo - once you make the right color changes like you have with Smooth Gray (great work btw!!) I assure you Echo will look GREAT!
Chris
Chris it took me nearly 10 days of solid work and the considerable help of two other people to customise Smooth Gray. I cannot go through that again.
ReplyDeleteThe instructions and skinning guides are hopeless for normal people to follow. The instructions I got from those I asked assumed a heap of knowledge I do not possess. Why they cannot just read, "locate this line in your code and insert these lines and then simply modify the colours to suit" is beyond me!
They give you a line of code but they don't tell you where to put it, they don't tell you that if you have a similar line you will need to remove the first part and only paste the second.
I am trying to move this blog to wordpress which will make this whole problem go away as JS Kit works much smoother over there but the thing preventing my move is JS-Kit's partial synchonisation with my blogger feed. For some reason it has queued 7 weeks worth of Blogger comments which when I try to move to Wordpress cannot be imported over. Provided I stay here with Blogger and stick with JS Kit comments those 7 weeks worth of comments will remain visible but I don't want to stay with Blogger and I am fast not wanting to stick with JS Kit if they are going to spring changes on the system I am using and render my site looking a mess causing me to spend a week recoding my blog every time they make an upgrade.
The only reason I got JS Kit comments was so my commenters could get a direct link back to their latest blog post and under Echo that feature seems to have vanished.
Some posts with lots of comments regularly freeze my laptop. I think the comments should have paging if that's possible.
ReplyDeletePage loading time is a bit of issue with this blog.
Ok I'll stop complaining now ... this blog rocks
I know. It happens to us and it can freeze a big computer too at times.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that when I paginate the comments we start losing them mysteriously (they only reappear when I unpaginate them).
*sigh*
Moving to Wordpress will solve all of this and JS Kit have promised, after I had a big hissy fit, to fix the problem preventing us moving within a week. (7 weeks worth of our comments are queued in their system and will not synchronise with Blogger so if we move from Blogger we will lose them all as there is no way to import them.)
Hopefully in a week or so things will improve comment-wise.
That said, I note that as of yesterday our blogger comments feed is down/frozen again but our JS Kit comments feed is not so I suspect that right now we are queuing comments in JS Kit's system once again...argh!
ReplyDeleteNow neither our Blogger comments feed or our JS Kit comments feed is giving me any notification of new comments!
ReplyDeleteThe Blogger feed is back being frozen again but the JS Kit Comments feed is still working, I am just not getting notified and each time I log into JS Kit and fiddle with the settings it makes no difference.
As Chris said above, JS Kit are phasing out this version of comments and rendering it unsupported in favour of Echo.
Whilst they have emailed me a promise to fix the queued comments problem within a week (how they characterise the 7 weeks worth of comments missing from my blogger feed and currently going missing from my blogger feed). I am now worried that we are going to have to switch ourselves to Echo today or tomorrow as we have to keep on top of new comments. :-(
So I will do my best to at least make them look legible but the coding is hell to understand.
I spoke to soon. Jskit comments suck big time and my blog now loads as fast as I swim!! Not very fast at all.
ReplyDeleteI am moving to wordpress. It is all set and and seems much faster.
For some reason my comments would not move so I had to move them across one by one. Each is basically a guest comment and they are all out of order. I dont have many comments so that only took 3 hours.
However I am getting more comments and the wordpress system seems to be a little better for organising things
I do like the fact you can change evrything on blogger so I can have a style that suits my content for free. My new style needs some work but it will get there soon
http://ozymandiaswarning.wordpress.com/
It sounds like your comments were not synchronised or else were stuck in their system like some of ours are as if they were in your blogger comment feed you should be able to simply import them to Wordpress.
ReplyDeleteI am contemplating manually moving all our missing/queued ones that cannot be imported accross but in our instance we are talking hundreds of comments so I envisage hours and hours and hours of work...
Don't manually copying and pasting all the comments in this website to wordpress!
ReplyDeleteHire a web developer. They can automate this kind of things.
Should do Sid but the money tree out the back is running a bit low.
ReplyDeleteOne can normally just import comments from blogger to wordpress however quite a number of our comments are stuck in JS-Kit's system and they cannot be imported.
ReplyDeleteI have consulted with a few experts and they agree that the problem would be best resolved by JS Kit who have no broken their assurance that it would be fixed within the week. Currently and for the past week every comment left on MandM is only going into JS Kit's system and is not being picked up by bloggers feed so every day I delay moving to Wordpress means more and more comments are not going to come with us.
I am not sure that a web developer can help. If I thought they could I would hire one.
I didn't know blogger to wordpress import/export feature. That would be the best way to go once JS-kit solved their issues.
ReplyDeleteA web developer can create a script to screen scrape this blog and a script to inject the scraped contents to another blog.
Hey world of warcraft guide dunno if you guys are into it our not, my wp blog, check it out for my new dark/clean theme, I love it on WP 2.8.4 btw I met Mallenwig last week at a convention, keep it up!
ReplyDelete