In my endless quest to have this blog be the harbinger of bright and shiny things, I’ve enabled/merged/slammed Facebook Connect into the comment system.

This means that you can log into the blog using your Facebook account, and then leave comments using your Facebook ID, which will use your Facebook icon and link back to your Facebook page, Facebook Facebook Facebook Facebook.

If, for some reason, you think leaving your real name on a blog read by MMO players is a BAD THING, you are of course free to use the standard pseudo-anonymous login system.

If you would like to add this to your own WordPress blog, here are some steps to follow:

  • As it uses edited themes and a plugin, you cannot use this on wordpress.com-hosted blogs.
  • You will need to create a Facebook application. Just call it “Comments for My Special Blog” or something similar. Details here. You will need to create the application so that you can get an API key but you won’t need to do anything else, the next steps handle that.
  • You then can download and install the WordPress plugin that makes comments Facebook-login aware. Plugin page
  • Follow the instructions. You *will* need to tinker with some things. As a note, I had to do the following to get it to a semi-working state:
    • Edited comments page from theme (still need to do some, the comment submit button is now back to a generic “Submit Query” HTML button)
    • Edited header file to ensure Internet Explorer compatibility
    • Edited .htaccess file and added plugin to wp-super-cache so that cookies were not munged
  • If you are already logged in to your blog (which is likely since you’ve been doing all of the above) you will need to log out for the “Connect using Facebook…” functionality to kick in. You most likely as the blog author will not use this as you already have a log in account. I recommend using a browser you rarely use (hi2u Internet Explorer) to both test for compatibility and leave a sample Facebooky comment (like I did on this post)

So yes, a lot of sound and fury signifying not much. I blame this on Trey Ratcliff, whose office I share and who took a picture of me wearing a bright purple wig this weekend.