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JS-Kit: a hosted commenting system

February 19th, 2008

(ed note: I'm writing these words to you at 4am as I am unable to sleep due to a sort throat, sick stomach, and terrible headache. I apologize in advance if they are utterly unreadable, deviate greatly from the topic at hand, or turn out to have nothing to do with JS-Kit or external commenting systems at all.)

As the fight for the highly coveted comment space here at revjim.net (a member of the Jim Reverend  family of sites) rages on, another contender raises it's head from above the crowd: JS-Kit. I've taken a few moments to look over their offerings and give it a good test.

I really only have one criticism to offer, but it's a big one, so I'll start with it. The service and it's feature set takes the same approach that was taken in developing a name for their service: JS-Kit is straight and to the point with little in the way of frills, user interface, or design. Some examples, perhaps, are due.

Adding comments to a page is as easy as dropping in two lines of code into your page template. With this process you can add comments to any page, anywhere, at any time. You can even add the same set of comments on two different pages with little to no trouble. The flexibility offered by this straight-forward no-nonsense approach is staggering. The same type of simplicity is available for adding ratings, reviews, and even polls to your site.  You can even customize the look and feel of this, giving you the ultimate in flexibility.

The downside to this is in the backend features. The dashboard and moderation panes are ugly, cluttered, and difficult to navigate. As a discussion participant, if I commented on more than 30 JS-Kit enabled sites, following this using JS-Kit's dashborad would be cumbersome at best. There seems to be no sense of community or a social aspect to the service they offer. But, then again, I don't think that's what JS-Kit was building.

Another example of this utter simplicity: JS-Kit knows what sites you manage by a cookie present in your browser. Lose the cookie and you have to reauthenticate via email. This isn't really that big of a deal, but it points  out even further just how plain their system is.

But you know what? Plain isn't always a bad thing. From the site owner standpoint, even though the data presented isn't pretty, it's in one spot and seems to be easy to read. The simplicity of this system is incredible. If you're looking to add comments to a site without any hassle and aren't interested in the social aspects of commenting outside of your own site, JS-Kit is probably the easiest way to do that.

For revjim.net, however, and my other sites, the point of using centralized comments is not to get a working comments systems — I have that already. The point is to improve that system, add functionality and flexibility, and make it easier for users to not only comment here, but to comment all over these world wide webs. To this end, JS-Kit isn't the best fit. However, I intend to keep it in my bag of tricks to be used for many other more suitable situations.

Now… that ratings and polls module they offer… well… you might just be seeing that here in the weeks to come.

Thanks, JS-Kit, for helping to make the good ole WWW more diverse, more interesting, and more feature filled.

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In: links, ljxp, software | 268 views

Viewing 4 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    Thanks for post, Revjim, especially for your constructive criticisms. We take these to heart. Just a quick followup: JS-Kit has absolutely NOT abandoned the goal of building "community or social" services. We have chosen to focus initially on building scale and on expanding our suite of content-generating services in the belief that "social" features are most valuable when they are broadly inclusive. You rightly point out that our dashboard is not designed to help users manage their comments across sites. That will be handled by our forthcoming, OpenID-based) user profile. Stay tuned, and thanks again for the review.

    Cheers,
    Eric
    JS-Kit
    • ^
    • v
    I look forward to your upcoming OpenID Profile. If you include an XML
    based comment importer as well well with well defined format, I may
    even switch over when the time comes. I was quite impressed with your
    service offering for content authors. I just wanted a little more in
    terms of what my READERS will get from it.
    • ^
    • v
    Revjim, take a look at SezWho as well...We provide the value in terms of connecting the conversations across sites without really taking over the whole comment system ... So you don't lose critical functionality like Trackbacks and other widgets like top commenters, recent comments etc. Also with the content on your site, you keep the page rank juice and page views on your sites as well.
    • ^
    • v
    Thanks for the pointer.

    I'd seen SezWho in my initial search for a centralized comments service.
    While I agree with you that hosting comments externally does forfeit
    some features locally, it is my goal to find similar, if not better,
    features in the hosted service I use. I'm not just looking to have the
    comments connected, grouped, rated, or shown with reputation. I want to
    eliminate user logins and provide commenters with a consistent interface
    that they'll understand and be familiar with. Additionally, SezWho
    requires that I have a working comments system already. While that is
    the case on this blog, that is NOT the case in all of the places I
    intend to use centralized comments.

    Thank you for your time. I'm sure SezWho is a good fit for someone. Just
    not me.

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