Filed under: World wide web, Blogging, Social Software

Disqus offers web publishers the capability to spruce up their comments sections with advanced features including threaded comments, avatars, and ratings. Perhaps the most significant advantage Disqus offers over the default Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad or Moveable Type comments features is the fact that users can sign up for one Disqus account and leave comments on thousands of blogs and web sites.

There’s just one problem (for web publishers): Up until now, user comments were stored on Disqus servers, not on your web page. That means search engines didn’t notice any information left in comments on your site, which could hurt your page rank. This day, Disqus took the first step to address this shortcoming with a new Wordpress plugin.

The new plugin is much more tightly integrated with Wordpress than the old version. First up, the comments are now indexable by search engines since they’re stored both on your site and on Disqus servers. Second, it’s now easier to import and export comments. And third, you can now moderate comments using the Wordpress Admin interface. No need to login to a separate web page. Improved plugins for other blog platforms should be coming soon.

The Disqus web site has also been redesigned to make it easier to navigate through comments. It’s also easier to follow comments left by a particular user.

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Filed under: World wide web, Social Software, Beta

Digsby is probably one of the coolest free Windows applications released in recent memory. The utility is like Pidgin mashed up with Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, and it has email notifiers for Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail as well as other services thrown in for good measure. There’s just one problem: Digsby is a major resource hog.

Early builds of Digsby have been known to eat over 100MB of memory. If you’ve got 4GB of RAM, that might not seem like much. But if you have an older Computer with 1GB or less, there’s no reason that a messenging program should eat up 10% or more of your memory.

A few days ago, Digsby pushed out a new alpha release that addresses the memory issue. I find that the alpha version tends to hover around 30MB of memory use, and according to the developers, it shouldn’t go much higher than 50MB even if you register a ton of email and social networking accounts.

The new version also features other performance enhancements, and improvements that will attempt to help you get around firewalls and proxy servers if necessary. There’s also a new crash reporter.

Keep in mind, the latest version of Digsby is still in alpha, which means there are likely plenty of bugs to be worked out. Normally I wouldn’t advocate replacing stable software with an alpha. But if you’ve been frustrated with Digsby’s high resource usage in the past, you should really check out the latest version. Just make sure to backup your settings first.

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