Greetings!
The 31st is finally here, so to all you Americans and Canadians out there, Happy Halloween!
A few notes.
This blog will continue to be under construction for what I hope is only another week or two, what with there being several features missing, a few cosmetic fixes needing to be implemented, as well as a few lingering “bugs” that need to be sorted out. Nonetheless, please be sure to check out all those links up top (or in the hamburger menu if you’re on a mobile or laptop) to see all the new goodies From Filmers to Farmers has in store.
Although I migrated over all the previous posts and even optimised their images for the new capabilities and layout, I did however leave out those four posts on multiculturalism that were this blog’s 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th postings (from back in 2014), posts that were pretty much lifted from my colleting-dust-on-the-shelf manuscript. I do however expect to be returning to the topic of authentic multiculturalism with much more stringency in 2018, at which point those four posts will reappear.
In those final hand-coded FF2F posts of mine I forgot to mention the ubiquitous commenting platform Disqus and why I wouldn’t want to use it. In short, and similar to the disdain felt by some towards Medium, Disqus has also gone through upheavals of its own due to changes in business plans. That could of course be annoying for some to say the least, never mind the fact that any and all comments left on the system are not only hosted by Disqus but are ultimately controlled by Disqus since it controls the entire getup. Furthermore, Disqus’ general manager of advertising has been quoted as claiming that “We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the Web”, yet another reason why there’s no chance that FF2F would ever use the platform and so resulted in me going with Discourse instead.
Paralleling sentiments I hold myself, O’Nolan has stated that
The value of a self-hosted platform is ultimately in power+control. Medium & Co [i.e. Disqus] have the market cornered on simple+easy.
I sent a message to you via LinkedIn, but please disregard. I found that my original account application with Discourse was rejected due to a space in my user name (no spaces allowed).
Glad to see your new format. It looks good. I look forward to more posts.
Glad to hear it, and that the sign-up process for commenters is in fact working. Currently starting the next post (which will finally return FF2F to its regular fare) while also working on a few other additions to the blog, both of which should be ready some time mid-month. At some point I’ll also see if I can start off by “importing” your previous comments and associating them with your FF2F-Discourse account - not too sure about that one yet though.
Nice clean platform. Looks good so far.
Unfortunately, I think migrating the Diner Databases from WP & SMF to Ghost would be rather challenging, definitely not a challenge I could handle.
RE
Finished, just a few minutes ago! That is, I just finished manually copying over all of FF2F’s previous comments that it garnered via Commentics. And by “manually” I mean creating dozens of faux user accounts and copying and pasting over each comment one by one. A bit of a pain in the arse to do, but with this blog having only garnered a couple-hundred or so comments so far it was just “small” enough to warrant the effort. You, of course, would never want to do that with the Diner, supposing you had any desire to migrate things over to a Ghost/Discourse setup.
Because yes, it can technically be done, although I’m not familiar with how the connections would be maintained between posts and their associated “topics” (the SMF-cum-Discourse comment thread). Because while there is an importer to migrate an SMF system to Discourse, and a plugin to migrate Wordpress to Ghost, there is of course nothing to maintain the connections between WordPress posts and SMF threads, which if anything would have to be done manually. 
<-- FYI, that’s not Dr. Pooper.
Otherwise, yes, they’re both very clean looking on the front-end and just as pleasant looking and functioning on the back-end.
Glad you like it so far!
Ask away if you’ve got any questions. I’m very well versed with Ghost and so-so versed with Discourse.
Let me know on the Diner when you find an example of someone using the Ghost-Discourse combination to have a seamless commentary between blog & forum.
I’ll ask around and see what I can find out.
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