First, as I tweeted earlier in the week, I’ll be writing for Forbes.com now, primarily about Houston Rockets salary cap matters. My first piece was about Morey’s decision regarding Chris Paul’s free agency. I plan to write a couple of times per week, so I hope you’ll check out my work over there.
Secondly, you’ll notice that comments are back on Red94. It’s been a long and confusing road on that end over the last 9(!) years. In the early years, I just used the standard commenting system that came with this site’s software. I experimented with a few other third party platforms here and there (one of which is the one I’ve gone back to), but ultimately wasn’t happy. What I never liked about the blog form, from Day 1, was the temporal nature of discussion. Any time I published a new post, I was essentially killing off whatever was being discussed in the comments section of the previous post. You could never establish long term debate on topics that I viewed as macro-level in the scope of team building. To that end, I installed the forum that is still running today. But the forum software was an entity separate and apart from the software running the blog. There was no out-of-the-box “bridge” to connect the two.
About five or six years ago, I spent something over $1,000 of my own cash to develop a mechanism that would connect the blog to the forum. Some of you all might remember it. I hired a third party developer to contemplate a plugin which essentially mirrored the comments section of the blog back into the forum. Users could post from either location; discussion threads from blog posts stayed housed back in the forum. I sometimes tied new posts to existing discussion threads for longer-term topics like “Who should the Rockets keep between Kyle Lowry and Goran Dragic?” It was what I had envisioned when I first identified the problem.
But this “bridge” got costly. The software was a load on the server. And it required continued maintenance for which I had to pony up. Eventually, the developer I had hired folded his business. I was on my own with a costly proprietary product that I couldn’t handle. I killed it off sometime in the last two years. You may remember that too because comments have been closed since then while I tried to figure out the next step.
I’ve now brought back Disqus comments, which you can access at the bottom of any new post.
You can log in with your Twitter account, which is nice. And the forum is still up and running for those of you who are inclined towards starting your own threads.
I wanted to address all of this in a post because I’ve seen some confusion in recent years, and more recently as I have begun writing again, as to why comments were not enabled on Red94. They are back, and I think we are going to keep it this way. Sorry for all of the confusion.
