The Marketing Technology Blog

A couple months ago, I wrote a post that took all of the third party commenting applications to task. The blog post was dead-on with the exception of SezWho, a system that allows you to keep your comments as well as provide you with the other commenting system features.

When you register your site with SezWho, it synchronizes your comments and posts with SezWho. This is advantageous for a couple of reasons:

• If SezWho goes down, my blog doesn’t.
• If SezWho goes out of business, I still have all my comments.
• Comments remain in the publishing of my pages, allowing my site posts to stay fresh and get them reindexed when user-generated content is added.

With all plugins, there are certain tweaks I like to make to help them blend in my blog, my theme and my content appropriately. In the case of SezWho, there were a couple of modifications that I made. The first was to style the output images for the Post Author and the Comment Author by adding the following CSS to my theme’s master stylesheet:

.cpEmbedImageAuthor {
height: 18px;
width: 18px;
cursor: hand;
}

.cpEmbedImageUserh {
margin: -15px 0 5px 5px;
height: 40px;
width: 40px;
display: inline-block;
float: right;
cursor: hand;
}

The next was a little more difficult and will need to be reapplied with any SezWho plugin update. I wanted to display the delicious logo when my Del.icio.us Daily Links post was automatically published to WordPress.

SezWho automatically inserts an image of the post author in the post header. I didn’t want the SezWho popup to apply to these posts but I did want the Del.icio.us logo instead of my avatar on these posts.

To do that, I actually had to insert an if statement at line 1000 in cpratecomments.php. The if statement basically inserts a Del.icio.us logo for the Del.icio.us posts and it excludes the extraneous script for the SezWho mouseover.

if($author_name=="del.icio.us") {
$text = "<img src=’http://www.marketingtechblog.com/wp-content/themes/ambientblue3/images/delicious.png’ class=’cpEmbedImageAuthor’ />";
}

I’d highly recommend SezWho’s technology over the other options out there, including CoComment, Disqus, and Intense Debate. The value of user-generated content to your blog is simply too much to pass up.