Exciting news: Beau and I are heading to Jakarta next month on behalf of Automattic (our parent company) and IntenseDebate to speak at WordCamp Indonesia!  IntenseDebate is a proud sponsor of this WordCamp.  If you’re in the region, book your tickets around January 30, 2010 and come and chat about WordPress with a bunch of like-minded folks! Grab a WCID badge for your blog and help spread the word (there’s a badge for you even if you’re not attending).

Hopefully we can get IntenseDebate translated to Indonesian in time. If anyone wants to help, please email me at labs@intensedebate.com.

In case you’re not familiar with it:

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,News

We’re excited to welcome The Christian Science Monitor to the IntenseDebate community. CSMonitor recently installed IntenseDebate on their blogs using our Generic Install process to add our JavaScript directly to their template. CSMonitor has won 7 Pulitzer Prizes and more than a dozen Overseas Press Club awards.

About CSMonitor.com:

The Christian Science Monitor is an international news organization that delivers thoughtful, global coverage via its website, weekly magazine, daily news briefing, email newsletters, and mobile site. […]  We’re also free to be an independent voice, devoid of the corporate allegiances and pressures that critics say too often skew today’s media.

[ Read more ]

You can see IntenseDebate in action on their Terrorism & Security blog (one of their many blogs).

[ Visit CSMonitor.com ]

Posted by Michael Koenig in community,News

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

[ From the WordPress Publisher Blog ]

We’re excited to see that Microsoft installed IntenseDebate on the Microsoft Partner Network to power comments and develop their community.

They’ve used our Generic Install process to add our JavaScript directly to their template, and have a unique (and pretty cool) configuration: all posts and comments are mirrored on http://digitalwpc.com.  So if you comment on a post at microsoftpartnernetwork.com, it will also be posted at digitalwpc.com.

About Microsoft Partner Network

Community is the Foundation of the Microsoft Partner Network
With our more than 640,000 partner organizations worldwide, the network offers real-time connection and support through communities that spark innovation and help you discover opportunities. You can build the relationships that best serve your business and customer needs. Connect and collaborate with other great minds to deliver innovative solutions.

[ Visit Microsoft Partner Network ]

Posted by Michael Koenig in News