Well as some of you may notice, I've replaced the blog comment system here on The Kick Board (which had been using a standard SP-Based List) with JS-Kit Echo (the free version at present). So far it seems to be working pretty well although I did have to play around with the order I'm loading and running scripts, but this is more just an issue with my crazy design than any other JS components.

 

 

Why did I do this? Well, there are a couple of reasons, the primary one is that I was tired of dealing with spam. Even though I was using Akismet with the CKS:EBE, it seemed that the spammers had found lots of ways around that. I considered going to an "authenticated only" comment system, but obviously to be effective I couldn't just make people sign up for my blog- so I would have had to use a third party identity provider. I actually got an open facebook widget working in sharepoint, but I wasn't really sure that many visitors to my website would bother auth'ing to FB just to leave a comment. For now I'm going to leave anonymous comments on for Echo and see how it goes, but if things get spammy, then I'll just require authentication-- luckily Echo supports auth'ing to 5 or 6 different open systems.

 

The secondary reason I really wanted to try Echo out is that it supports a lot of real-time social network connectivity (for example, it can show tweets about your post). This does require an upgrade to the paid version of the control (it's only $12/year), so as soon as I get the free version stable and working consistently then I'll do this. Really I'm using this as a proof of concept platform for an idea I have related to bringing social media content into the SharePoint collaboration space.

 

For more information about JS-Kit Echo go check out their site at http://js-kit.com and please give it a whirl here and leave me some comments so I can shake all the integration bugs out. Thanks!