Casual Hex

So you’ve got a nice site going and you’re registering more and more hits every day. You passed one hundred daily unique hits last week and you’re already looking at a thousand. Next thing you know it’ll be two, three and five thousand.

But yet, no one seems to be participating in the article comments. If you’re lucky you might get 1 out of every 10 visitors to take the time to say something. Don’t get too stressed over that. Yeah, I know, easier said than done. When I was running a site in the video game genre a few years ago it went from a simple hobby site to being considered “the best” by many and had thousands of daily hits in just a year. But my forum usage always stayed around 10% of my readers. There’s really not much that you can do about that. It’s generally how it works at every site. There’s all sorts of reasons for that. Some don’t want to give up their name and e-mail address. Some feel that they don’t have anything new to add. Others don’t want their opinions and thoughts to be squashed by some flame-baiting Comic Book Guy that has nothing better do do from his Mommy’s basement.

PostReach has come up with a simple little idea that might just help readers to test the waters of commenting. With ClickComments a person doesn’t have to register or even give their name and e-mail address. With the click of a button a person can let ya know what they think about the article. It isn’t exactly deep or super engaging but it is simple and easy for those that wouldn’t otherwise chime in.

No, there’s no pleasure center button. It’s a simple menu of eight buttons, ranging from ‘Cool Stuff’ to ‘Great Find’. For some reason there isn’t any option for negative opinions. Leaving that to the trolls, I guess.

I’m giving the system a try here, even though I don’t quite have the hits to give it a fair shake. I’m really curious how it would go on a popular site. At the moment I’ve got it set to display the icons on individual article pages. I’m not so sure about cluttering up the front page with multiple comment button boxes. Maybe one or two people that would have never otherwise made a comment will get click happy. That’d be a giant increase in my comment stats.

Oh, yeah… that also means that while PostReach doesn’t include instructions for integrating ClickComments into TextPattern that it is definitely a piece of cake to do so. Just take a look at the method provided for MovableType and replace the MT variables with TxP variables. In my case I just tossed the following bit of code onto the end of my default form.

<txp:if_individual_article>
<div name="ClickComments">
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" src="http://www.postreach.com/ccengine/display_iframe?perlink=<txp:permlink />&url=<txp:site_url />"></script>
</div>
</txp:if_individual_article>