Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2011; the Facebook Comments box for Blogger, the Fan Box and the installation steps it describes have since changed or been discontinued, and its pros and cons reflect the plugin as it was then.
I’ve finally decided to install Facebook Comments on this blog. It’s a fairly complicated installation for a Blogger blog, especially for someone like me, since programming isn’t my thing. In fact, if you look closely, a fragment of the template has “popped out” at the top of the blog, and I’ll have to try to find a way to put it back where it belongs.
For now I’m also going to keep the old comment system until I see how readers react. The advantage I see in Facebook Comments is that users don’t need to register to leave a comment. The drawback is that it will be hard to know when someone has commented, because these comments aren’t sent to your email.
I’ve also been told that Facebook Comments often fails if you have the Facebook Fan Box installed, which can sometimes stop the app from loading.
For those of you who feel like installing it on your own sites, the two places where I found a reasonably detailed explanation are Vagabundía (in Spanish) and Allblogtools. Don’t ask me why, but I couldn’t get it working by following the steps from just one of them, and in the end I had to combine the two, deleting, removing, adding… In short, it took me more than three hours (how clumsy of me).
If your experience with installing plugins is anything like mine, it goes without saying that you should save a copy of your template before you start, because you’ll probably need it.
Featured image: Sebastian Fuss, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
