Let me start off by saying that IntenseDebate is pretty cool. Giving you the ability to easily add in commenting functionality to any given page, with no cost involved!
However, like every other widget, they are a serious pain in the neck to customize visually. Yah, installation is a breeze, but when it renders on the page everything went screwy. Why, well the styles applied to the Web site I was adding it to conflict with the styles generated by the widget. Argh!
And that, my friends, is the annoying thing about the “C” in CSS. Sure, I could go through and overwrite the offending rules, but how much time is that going to take? The style sheet that comes with the widget is crazy big – and I’m way to lazy to go through it and fix/overwrite in order to make things display correctly.
The solution? Stuck the bad boy into an iframe and found a crappy JavaScript that would resize the iframe to the height of it’s content so that no vertical scrollbars would appear.
One last gripe. They did not test this thing very well in IE6 – I found a lot of display issues. Since our client is mainly an IE6 user, this was annoying and I had to spend quite some time fixing up the offending styles.
Cascading woes with IntenseDebate
by Mike Badgley on April 24, 2009
Let me start off by saying that IntenseDebate is pretty cool. Giving you the ability to easily add in commenting functionality to any given page, with no cost involved!
However, like every other widget, they are a serious pain in the neck to customize visually. Yah, installation is a breeze, but when it renders on the page everything went screwy. Why, well the styles applied to the Web site I was adding it to conflict with the styles generated by the widget. Argh!
And that, my friends, is the annoying thing about the “C” in CSS. Sure, I could go through and overwrite the offending rules, but how much time is that going to take? The style sheet that comes with the widget is crazy big – and I’m way to lazy to go through it and fix/overwrite in order to make things display correctly.
The solution? Stuck the bad boy into an iframe and found a crappy JavaScript that would resize the iframe to the height of it’s content so that no vertical scrollbars would appear.
One last gripe. They did not test this thing very well in IE6 – I found a lot of display issues. Since our client is mainly an IE6 user, this was annoying and I had to spend quite some time fixing up the offending styles.
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