Well, that last post about Mortal Kombat X didn’t work out nearly as well as I wanted it to.
The biggest reason was because after the announcement from Ed Boon and the posting of the teaser trailer, I was focusing more on the function of my own site than reading the press release or looking at the new website. I was having trouble with the comment system, and wanted to get that fixed first.
My site currently uses Disqus for its comment system, just like a lot of other sites. I didn’t have a problem with it; it’s worked pretty well for what I wanted to use it for. However, a couple of days ago I learned of an add-on for WordPress called Jetpack, which supplements a self-hosted WordPress install with functionality from WordPress.com. Among the additions given was an improved comment system over the original one WordPress comes with, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try, installing it on Saturday and deactivating Disqus.
Part of my thinking was that with the new Jetpack features, including the comment system and the better cross-post to social media functionality, I could start using my site more for posts that I would normally keep on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Google+. I also wanted to make it easier for people to comment on my posts.
Unfortunately, the Jetpack comment system failed to appear. The comment system remained just like the old default WordPress comment system, no matter what I tried.
I finally did some research this morning, and found the answer: my theme is too out of date. With version 3.0, WordPress changed the internals of the comment system, and themes needed to be updated in order to take advantage of the new features. I had no idea at the time, as I had already migrated to Disqus by that point. Changing it by myself was not something I could do, as I’m practically worthless when it comes to CSS and PHP coding. I tried switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme, but was not happy with it. For a bit, I was unsure what to do.
The answer, as it was, came via a simple question: “Who comments on my site, anyway?” :-)
In the end, I decided to keep Jetpack installed, along with several of its add-ons. I went ahead and disabled the comment add-on, and went back to using Disqus. For what I need, it works pretty well and I never had a real complaint with how it works. In fact, when looking closer at Disqus, it already did everything I wanted the Jetpack comment system to do anyway.
As for the site itself, I’m going to go ahead and try to post more to it. The Mortal Kombat X post kind of deflated my sails a bit, but I’d like to use this site for a bit more than the occasional post that is longer than what I would put on Facebook/Twitter/Google+. It looks a bit lost and abandoned when I don’t keep it up-to-date.
We’ll see what happens.