Well ... sort of.

There are still a couple of elements I want to get back, mainly the red band that always separated the header and the rest of the page and (much more importantly) the random quotes that has been the hallmark of the spontaneity of the RWRepublic.

Comments are, however, up and running. I have picked up the "IntenseDebate" commenting system to replace Haloscan. A couple of things here:

1. To get to the comments, the best way to go is to click the title of the post, which will take you to a page with the post at the top and comments for that post at the bottom. You can also click on the "Comments" link if there is one, but that will give you a plain comment window instead of showing you the post. From there you just do what you've always done, for the most part. IntenseDebate does offer some additional functionality, but if all you want to do is what you've always done, you will do just fine.

2. IntenseDebate does visibly slow down page loading time. It's not a huge deal, but sometimes you sometimes may want to hit your "refresh" button if it seems to have locked up. I have usually found this to help.

3. Sometimes your comment will be held for moderation. I have not yet reviewed ID's moderation rules or looked at how I could adjust them, but unless you really piss me off or something, you will not have a problem with getting your comments approved so please don't sweat it.

4. Comment length limits are shorter than Haloscan's. You still get a lot of room, but don't be afraid to put up a "Continued" comment if you so wish.

5. There is no simple importation mechanism to bring the old comments over. I have backed them up and will gradually see to it that they are added to their respective posts. Comments brought over from Haloscan will have a timestamp added to them in the format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS. If you see "-5:00" appended to the end, you can safely ignore it.

Hopefully ID doesn't aspire to pulling a similar stunt to the course of action chosen by Haloscan. It really pissed me off that they gave no notice whatsoever so that people could make proper preparations to change services if they saw fit. It's not that their price is unreasonable, I just can't afford it right now in my current state of employment (which could be improving very soon - knock on wood).

Please let me know about any concerns you have with the new comment system.

RWR