EntreCard and SezWho

While I was off on vacation, EntreCard announced a partnership with SezWho. EntreCard is a site where bloggers can drop cards on one another as part of an advertising scheme to drive traffic to their sites. The folks at EntreCard note that adding comments is another key part of how to drive traffic to a site. So, they’ve partnered with SezWho, which is a site aimed at driving traffic through comments.

SezWho has gotten some mixed reviews early on. Apparently, early on, they had some distributed denial of service attacks which slowed down everyone who has using SezWho. In my case, I’m using Drupal for my blog, and their support for Drupal is in beta. So far, my experiences it that it is probably better to think of it as Alpha code.

When you install SezWho for Drupal, you need to go through the regular steps of a Drupal install. Then, you need to edit a configuration file, go in and tweak your theme files and hope things work.

In my case, they did not seem to work at all. The blocks showed up, but that was about it. After digging into the code, I found that it actually had synchronized some of my content, but a very limited amount. The posts that it synchronized didn’t have comments, so I couldn’t see what was going on. To complicate things even further, it seemed to have my content attributed to my old Optonline email address, while my comments were being attributed to my Orient Lodge email address, as was my registration and my EnterCard connection. This remains an outstanding issue which I hope will get addressed when their Drupal person gets back.

As I explored further, I found that their synchronize software only synchronizes content for non-blog nodes for the website as a whole. Since Drupal can have multiple blogs, SezWho has separate synchronization for each individual blogger, and that separate synchronization applies only to blog posts. In my case, I’m the only person using this Drupal site as a blog, so I didn’t set up a separate account for the site as a whole as well as for my individual blog here. So, it didn’t find any of my blog posts, just a few random other pages. I changed the synchronization program to synchronize blog posts for the main account, and now it shows all my posts as being synchronized. That is, at least, in the database. I had to tweak a few other places to force the blogid to zero to get other content to show up, and even with that it is spotty, either lagging or failing, and not managing to handle comments at all.

Later, I tried tweaking parameters another way, adding my Optonline email address to my SezWho profile and setting up a separate blog on the SezWho profile for my blog entries. Convoluted. Also, it hasn’t made any apparent difference.

Oh well.

General discussion

So, now I’m tied into three different comment systems. If you follow me on FriendFeed you can add comments there. I’ve tweaked Drupal to pull in those comments. There is a little bit of a lag. I like the way FriendFeed integrates with all the other life streams. I just don’t like the lag, or the difficulty of finding a place to add a comment initially.

You can also use Disqus. It seems to work pretty well, but for some reason, it is flagging some very old content as new. I’m not sure why that is happening. However, the comments can be added from the Drupal site and it seems to work pretty well. A nice plus is that if you use Seesmic, you can add video comments. The downside is that comments are stored on their server, and my access and control of the content is limited.

Then, there is SezWho. What is nice about SezWho is that they are supposed to integrate with the Drupal comment system, so comments stay part of Drupal. I can control them however I wish. The downside is that SezWho just doesn’t seem ready for beta testing.

So, for the time being, you’ll have different options for adding comments. None of them are perfect. All of them, hopefully, will be evolving to be better systems in the future.