What can I say? We’re on a roll right now! Everyday we’re thinking up innovative ways to improve your commenting experience, and everyday the Intense Debate community is submitting new awesome feature ideas. To top it off, our Intense Debate developers have somehow managed to keep up with all of this obsessive enthusiasm! What we’ve got now is a bunch of new Intense Debate features to introduce to you. In fact, I’d say that we have a plethora! (such a great word…I never get to use it.)

It wouldn’t be cool of us to slowly release these features over the next couple of weeks and deprive you of their incredible commenting power. So instead we’re just going to open the gates and release new features each day this week!

Today’s new feature for the Intense Debate commenting system is the shiny new Subscribe Menu. Now you can subscribe to comments through a variety of common RSS readers such as Google Reader, Netvibes, and Newsgator.

Using our new Subscribe Menu, you can subscribe to either the comments of a blog post or to the entire blog. Plus there’s a direct link to the RSS feed.

What do you think? Got any suggestions on the services you’d like to see in the Subscribe Menu? Are there some services that shouldn’t be there at all? Drop us a note at feedback@intensedebate.com, or post a comment below.

Be sure to check back tomorrow to learn about additional new features.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’ve got some great users here at Intense Debate. One user in particular has really taken Intense Debate to another level. Paul Arterburn has written a Firefox Extension to add Intense Debate to Google Reader. Basically it adds a comment link to the reader (below).

Clicking the link opens up comments inline like the following:

This allows you to comment on the articles with any others that have the extension installed. You can also get a feed of all of the comments on any post here.

You can download the add-on from his site (as well as download the Greasemonkey script version). Tell us what you think of it.

Also, if you’ve done something interesting with Intense Debate please let us know.

Posted by Jon Fox in features

We’re very excited here at Intense Debate. Today we’ve released a new feature that enables commenters to display their latest tweets directly through the Intense Debate comment system! It integrates seamlessly with the avatar menu, and is always updated as your latest tweet is fetched promptly when you hover a person’s avatar.

All of you that have already entered a Twitter profile ID will start seeing your tweets inside your avatar menu automatically. For anyone that hasn’t, you can enable your latest twitters or a personal message through your Edit Profile page. It’s simple and easy, just remember to put in your twitter profile URL.

As always, watch out… We’ve got more exciting stuff in our gun barrel, and will be guilty of a large shootout pretty soon.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in features

After our last big release we got so much positive feedback that we’ve decided to update our widgets as well.

Today we’re happy to present you with a refreshed version of our three different Comment Widgets, and also a new one! We call the fourth spawn the Blog Stats Widget. It’s a slick, tiny appetizer mainly created for bragging. Have a peek at it to the right, then go ahead and install it!

The changes aren’t just visual, though. We’ve rewritten all of the widgets from the ground up to make them faster than ever before.

So if you haven’t already installed one of these great widgets check them out. They’re available on your blog widgets page as well as on your personal widgets page.

Posted by Isaac Keyet in features

Today we’re happy to announce another release, although this one probably won’t be as noticeable as some in the past.  Last night we released a completely rewritten loading system for our comments.  We’ve also completely redone our caching procedures, upgraded our infrastructure, and even optimized our server configurations a bit.  So what does all this mean?  Well, it’s all geared toward making the comments load faster than ever before.  You should start seeing noticeable improvements in our comment system’s load time.

Also, something that is a little more obvious is the addition of the sorting options to the comment system.  You can now sort by date (like a more traditional comment system would), comment rating (what it’s always done up till now), and most recent activity, which orders them by putting the most recent comments at the top, making it easier than ever to keep track of how the conversation is progressing and organize the comments how you want them.

We’ve got a lot of changes in progress right now and lots of exciting things happening in the next few weeks…we’ll let you know as it unfolds.

Posted by Jon Fox in features