In case it wasn’t obvious, this blog is a new project for me. There are many like it, but this one is mine (sorry, couldn’t resist the reference).
At any rate, given that I’m starting a fresh new project I’ve decided to make it an ‘all new’ experience. For instance, this is my first WordPress blog; in truth it’s been a year or two since I’d even played around with the platform. Also new is the choice of comment providers: Intense Debate. 
So, why Intense Debate you ask? First and foremost is that it’s new to me and thus fits in well with the ‘all new’ experience on this blog. I’m using Disqus on a separate project and am quite pleased with it, but there’s no way to make a comparison between two services if you haven’t in fact used both services.
At this point I have the service up and running, and integration into the WordPress platform was about as quick and seamless as one could hope for. Granted, this is a new blog so there weren’t many comments to port over to the Intense Debate database, so I can see where an established blog would have a much longer transition time.
The setup is too new for me to have many thoughts on it, so I will likely have to revisit the issue to let anyone who cares know what I think about it. So far I can say that I like the straightforward option to export comments, and that I dislike where the widgets are placed in their system. Currently widgets have their own area within the user dashboard rather than being a sub-set of the options for a particular blog. Since they give the option to have multiple blogs underneath a single user account, it would make more sense to have the widgets show up as options under each particular blog. Then again, as I don’t have multiple blogs setup in their system, perhaps the menu items change when there are multiple blogs under a user account and I can’t see that.
Feel free to let me know what you think of the new commenting experience!
