We’re excited to release 4 more translations this week and dish out some much deserved credit to the awesome folks behind them:

• Czech – Jirka Kouba
• Danish – Lars Nørgaard
• Swedish – our very own Isaac Keyet
• Turkish – Semih Aksu

IntenseDebate is now available in 24 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Ukrainian. And there are more on the way!

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at http://intensedebate.com/editacct.

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Our Plugins API is seeing a lot of activity now, and we’re pleased to announce the release of the new Blog Tweets plugin.  Developed by Vivek Puri, the Blog Tweets plugin uses LinksAlpha to aggregate Tweets linking to your blog post in your IntenseDebate comments section.  Blog Tweets will show up to 20 Tweets in your comments section – pretty cool!

Aggregating Tweets linking to your blog can help provide a more holistic view of the conversation going on about your posts.  This has been a popular feature request, and we’re really excited about Vivek’s work.

About the plugin:

When you activate the plugin, LinksAlpha.com indexes your blog feed and scours Twitter for related Tweets that link back to your post. This includes Tweets that link to your post using URL shortening services like bit.ly.

There is a 5-10 minute period for your post to be indexed by LinksAlpha, which means there will be a slight delay for Tweets to start showing up in your comments section.

Also, when the plugin hits the Twitter API it is likely that Twitter will only return results for recent posts, so Tweets about your older posts won’t necessarily show up.

All Tweets are displayed just below the comment section under the header, “Social Trackbacks,” so Tweets won’t interrupt the comment stream.

Like all IntenseDebate plugins, adding advanced features to your comment section is a piece of cake: just visit your Plugins Page at http://intensedebate.com/plugins, and select “Activate” next to the plugin. That’s all! There’s no additional code for you to manually install, so there’s no need to get your hands dirty messing around with your template.

Please keep in mind that activating plugins for your IntenseDebate comments means that additional code will be loading in your comments section, which may impact load times (especially if you’re running loads of our cool plugins 😉 ).

Interested in flexing your own coding muscles and developing a super-slick plugin? Check out our Plugin Resources and documentation. You can also check out our Plugins blog post for more information.

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

We’ve added a new setting for your layout: now you change the number of comments displayed per page in your IntenseDebate comment section. This has been a popular request, so we’re happy to deliver on it.

While the default setting is 25 comments per page, you can choose to display 10, 25, 50, or 100 comments per page. Please keep in mind that displaying more than 25 comments may result in an increase in load time since we will be loading more data. We are continuing our work to optimize this and improve load times for larger volumes of comments on a single page.

Currently comment threads collapse by default when there are 25 threads on the page.  Changing to the number of comments per page will also change the thread collapse number.  So setting 50 comments per page will set the thread collapse at 50 threads.  Currently this setting cannot be disabled completely, but we hope this will help improve your commenting experience.

You can customize this setting in your Layout Settings page at http://intensedebate.com/edit-site-layout. Thanks again for your feedback!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

This is super-cool!  We’re excited to introduce a new IntenseDebate plugin developed by Sam Walters: Comment Translate.  Built using Google Translate, Comment Translate gives your readers the option to translate all comments and trackbacks on your post into their language of choice.

Languages available for comment translation:

Sam’s plugin couldn’t have come at a better time as we continue to expand our localization project to make IntenseDebate more accessible for everyone. Thanks to our fantastic group of volunteers, the IntenseDebate comment section is now available in 20 languages with more on the way!

To activate the Translate Comments plugin, visit your Plugins Page in your IntenseDebate account at http://intensedebate.com/plugins. Locate the Translate Comments plugin and select “Activate”. That’s it! It’s just that one simple click and your comments can now be translated to 51 languages!

Interested in flexing your own coding muscles and developing a super-slick plugin? Check out our Plugin Resources and documentation. You can also check out our Plugins blog post for more information.

Hat’s off to Sam for his contribution!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features

Last week we announced the release of 6 new translations, and we’re pleased to release 2 more translations this week and dish out some much deserved credit to the awesome folks behind them:

• Polish – miguelm75
• Slovene – Marck Goran Lrencin, Aleš Gabrovec

IntenseDebate is now available in 20 languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, English, Estonian, Filipino, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Malay, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Latin American Spanish, European Spanish, and Ukrainian. And there are more on the way!

These translations are available in your Blog Settings page at IntenseDebate.com.

We’re looking forward to making more translations available for use as they continue to get completed. So far we’ve received volunteers to help translate these additional languages (let us know if you would like to help with any of these!):

Don’t see your language? Give us a hand!
If you’re interested in getting involved, now is the perfect time! Please email us at labs@intensedebate.com for information. Ideally we’d like to have at least two Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiønër’s working together for each translation. Thanks!

Posted by Michael Koenig in features