We reviewed the rather fine Hubski.com social community a while back, and if you remember we were rather impressed by the quality of the interaction and content of this new online community. Kind of like Reddit without the LOLCATS. Well it appears we liked the site too much, because no sooner had we finished writing about it, than we found ourselves at the center of some sort of plot to destabilize civilization.
By that we mean, we decided to help Mark, Steve and the crew over there to bring their version of the ‘thoughtful web’ to a wider audience – namely by sponsoring development of a small free WordPress Plugin called Hubski Comments.
The plugin allows anyone with a self-hosted WordPress blog to insert comments from the Hubski community into the comment stream on their posts. The plugin doesn’t replace or interfere with the existing blog comments at all (even Disqus et al), it just adds an additional section for more comments if they come from the Hubski site.
Comments only appear if a post has been submitted from your blog and it has been commented on, and blog owners have the power to mute comments and block users if they start acting in a troll-like fashion, despite being brought up as well mannered members of society. You can see an example of the plugin in action if you scroll down on this post here.
We’re leaving all the admin and support issues to the most excellent Hubski team, but hopefully the installation should be fairly straightforward, and the results equally interesting. There should be no load issues on your blog, and zero disruption to your life and family.
So let’s repeat – the comments box/section will not appear unless a) you have submitted a particular WordPress post from your blog to Hubski and b) someone has commented on that post on Hubski. Oh and by the way, commenting can be done in either direction…from blog to Hubski or vice versa. You can pick up the zip file for installation on your WordPress blog from this Hubski Comments link.
Hopefully the plugin will migrate to the WordPress Plugin Directory at some point. Enjoy!
[Update: Mark reminds me that blogs will have to be approved by the Hubski team before the plugin is connected up, and the team are currently limiting these to sites that they believe will align nicely with the Hubski mission.]
