My first experience with Disqus was at Brent Spore’s iBoughtAMac.com. When I went to make a comment there, this dialog popped up for Disqus. I didn’t know what it was but it was clear if I wanted to leave a comment, I had to go through this thing. Since I didn’t have time to look into it right then, I just didn’t leave my comment. This happened several times.

Finally, I wanted to leave a comment enough that I clicked on the Disqus logo, where I read that it was a tool for web publishers to use for managing comments. I noticed you could create a profile, and that somehow would help an individual manage or track their own comments across different sites. At the time, I didn’t feel a need for help with this. I still don’t. I pretty much know where I comment and what communities I belong to. I didn’t look much further into it. But I understood “this thing adds value for the site owner, but not for me.”

One problem I have with the Disqus dialog is that, even though it allows you to comment as a guest (instead of connecting to Twitter, Facebook or OpenID) by entering your email address and name, just like a WordPress installation that doesn’t use Disqus, it interrupts my thought process. A pop-up opens with these options, and I have to think about it and make a choice before I can leave my comment. Since I don’t encounter Disqus every day I have to remember what it is, or look it up, decide whether I have an account, remember how I answer the dialog, and if I don’t remember right away, suddenly I’m wondering why this thing is in my way, and what implications the posting choice I make will have for my privacy, online identity, etc. I just want to leave a comment, yo.

When I do comment through Disqus, I use the Guest option. But it recognizes my email and pulls up a profile picture. I don’t know where that comes from. I think it’s getting it from Gravatar, or maybe at some point I created a Disqus profile, but I’m not sure, and the Disqus dialog doesn’t explain. So if I want the answer to that question I’m going to have to go dig it up from the Disqus site. I don’t really want to spend my time trying to figure this out, so I don’t. But every time I comment through Disqus and it recognizes me, I’m left with a vague creepy feeling that becomes part of my commenting experience, and thus part of the feeling I have about sites that use Disqus. I always have in mind that if I’m using a service I don’t pay for, I’m not the customer. I’m the product. I just want to leave a comment, not wonder who’s tracking me and how they use information about me.

Also, say I don’t know a person well, but find my self at their blog. Maybe they motivate me to engage. From my point of view, I’m there and commenting because I want to enter a relationship. I feel like we have something to say to each other. When I go to leave a comment, and that Disqus box pops up, I feel like the underlying message to me is “Hi. I don’t trust that you’re not a spammer. So if you want to start a relationship with me, I’m going to require you to be involved with this 3rd party, too.” But, but… I just want to leave a comment. I don’t use Disqus on my site, and other plugins take care of spam just fine, and it’s hard for me to see the need for this.

And so I guess my dislike of Disqus comes from never having realized a benefit from it myself, but knowing it’s keeping track every time I comment through it. If someone showed me a reason to love it, maybe I’d change my mind. But for now it’s come to leave a negative aftertaste. I view it as a comment deterrent. If you see a Disqus-powered comment from me anywhere, it means at least at that time, the relationship I wanted to create with the site owner was more powerful to me than the vague “ick” I feel when I see a Disqus dialog.

Your server stats can alert you the myriad ways that bad people are trying to hack into your site and use it for their own purposes. Today’s example comes right out of my server statistics Failed Requests section.

Click image for legible version of the failure report.

My report shows multiple failed attempts to get two files, wordtube-button.php and wptable-button.php, by trolling through multiple plugin directories. It didn’t take long in the search engines to find that both files come from WordPress plugins by the same developer. I found that in older versions of his wordTube and wp-Table plugins, input passed to these two php files is not properly verified before being used to include files. New versions of these plugins that close this little security flaw are now available. So hackers are out there randomly hunting for people who have older versions of these plugins installed to exploit them and distribute who knows what.

I don’t even have these plugins installed! But that fact, plus the briefest scrutiny of what directories the failed requests were coming from was enough to spot the pattern and make me go “hmmmmm.”

Now if only there were a plugin that allowed me to send the people hunting for this exploit to hell, I’d be all set.

Watch your server stats, friends. There’s an awful lot of useful stuff in there. The Failed Reports section is often a great indicator of thwarted hacks and other funny business.

Gena Haskett, Robyn Tippins and I presented an Advanced Video Lab at BlogHer today. We touched pretty briefly on video compression before splitting into small workgroups covering storyboarding, lighting on the cheap, and editing tips to help the BlogHers kick ass at videoblogging.

I promised the attendees a handout covering basic video compression settings and a brief review of three software applications that convert video from one format to another. Here it is:

I have to apologize for not adding hyperlinks to the PDF file. I thought it was more important to get the document up quickly than to bell-n-whistle it up. When I get home I will do that, and replace the PDF file – at which point this paragraph will be displayed crossed out (strikethrough).

Coming ASAP, I’ll put up some video of my cheap lighting tricks.

I updated the graphics and color scheme for What We Found by using the deadly Color Palette Generator at DeGraeve.com.

To use it, you give it the URL of any image on the web. Then you click the Color-Palette-ify button and it generates both a dull and vibrant palette for you by sampling colors from the image. It freaking rocks.

In my case, I gave it the URL of my own photograph, hosted on Flickr. But you can use any image you can find. So go find a beautiful picture, and generate your own color palette.