Back. Again.
I decided to remove Intense Debate. It’s pretty spiffy, but I want 100% control over my domain, right down to the comments. And unfortunately, as much as Intense Debate did have to offer, it just wasn’t enough for me. Heh.
Getting rid of Intense Debate and reverting back to regular comments was a pain in the butt. See, Intense Debate had “taken over” for commenting, so when you guys were commenting on the last entry, everything was being stored with Intense Debate. Grabbing those comments and bringing them back to WordPress wasn’t a one step process. It was either all or nothing with Intense Debate — so I had to export all the comments it had grabbed from jenn.nu yesterday afternoon, which was about 5,000 total. This was in a standard XML format, which WordPress refused to accept. And importing comments from Intense Debate via the plugin here in the WP Admin Panel? Also a no-go. First, Spam Karma 2 reared its ugly head and prevented a lot of the comments from coming in. So I had to deactivate it. When I did finally get the comments imported, my fears came to light: instead of WordPress rejecting the duplicate comments and only importing the new ones, it imported EVERYTHING. Hello duplicates!
Luckily, I anticipated that something like that might happen, and so I made a backup of my comments table prior to doing the import. But that backup was 31mb in size, and we all know that while phpMyAdmin claims to accept import files up to 52mb in size, the reality is that it gets its panties in a bunch if you hand it anything bigger than 6mb. So then I had to sit here with Wordpad and manually cut up the one file into ten smaller files. As you can see, phpMyAdmin played nice with the little 3mb tidbits I fed it, and everything is back in order.
Two things I came across tonight with my blog tweaking:
WordPress 2.5 has Gravatar support built right in. But as far as I can tell this isn’t really mentioned anywhere. Why is that? Anyway, you can include Gravatar icons for your commenters (provided that they have one!) by using the following function in your comments.php template (size = ’75′ determines the size of the displayed Gravatar; this can go up to 100px):
echo get_avatar( get_comment_author_email(), $size = '75', $default = '' )
Rather than continue to put up with flickrRSS displaying pictures from my stream only when it feels like it, I decided to head straight to Flickr for a badge of sorts to put up. The following code works flawlessly:
<div id="flickr"> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne?count=6&display=latest&size=s&layout=v&source=user&user=YOUR_FLICKR_ID_NUMBER_GOES_HERE"></script> </div>
Note that enclosing the javascript in the flickr ID is entirely optional, but in doing so you can then stylize the look of your images (borders, padding) by adding the flickr ID to your stylesheet. 
I am aware of the following issues:
All those broke with the upgrade to 2.5, but I didn’t notice until 1) Julia pointed out the dead guestbook and 2) I checked the other pages myself. I’d fix them now, except that it’ll take some time, and as it is my time should have been up several hours ago. My darlings will have me up by 9:30am, I’m sure, so I’ll have to tackle those things on Sunday or Monday. Goodnight!
intense debate broke my blog when i tried to install it *boo* i’d like it better if i could change the colours around and stuff, it’s still pretty neat but i don’t really get enough comments for it to be a big deal to not have anything fancy. i’m thinking of updating to 2.5- it looks fancy! i should set aside some free time (haha) to do the whole backup and update thing.
I love your new layout Jenn!
That sucks that you had such a problem trying to change back to wordpress. At least you managed to do it in the end. Hehe, I knew about that built in gravatar thing but I don’t think I’ll ever use it.
P.s. you’ve been tagged! http://icaughtfire.org/?p=175
Wow. Ur so smart!!!! *admire*
So far I’ve really liked the upgrade to 2.5.
My only problem was when I first upgraded I couldn’t upload images or files of any sorts. I’d get that http error. Did you happen to get it? I had to search online for a fix and now it works fine. I’ll have to go check out the flickr badge, sometimes my flicksRSS doesn’t update photos for a couple of days when I add them. o_O
Wowza! Yay upgrade and plugin headaches. Eesh. I’m glad you’ve got it worked out. And not to be a pain, but the color for your links on your entries blends right into the background for me, fyi.
I like it!
Edit; kay, never mind. The white background just hadn’t shown up. I LIKE IT MOAR NOW! HAHA.
Wow, what a pain in the butt. I will learn from your experience with Intense Debate and never, ever use it. lol.
Intense Debate never worked for me. *shrug* It’s not a big deal, really.
I might have to look into dropping FlickrRSS, but I haven’t ever had it *not* show a photo. It just takes a while to update sometimes.
Site is looking wonderful! You always make awesome themes!
I tagged you.
I personally, like the style of your comments better than the intense debate. The look of it bothers me.
I am loving your new layout Jenn and like Dan said you are very smart.