Blogger Mobile Theme and IntenseDebate Integration

The new Blogger mobile theme does a much better job formatting content onto mobile devices

Can IntenseDebate be integrated with Blogger mobile theme? In a word, no.

In 2011, Blogger implemented a fantastic new mobile theme template. However, this new theme does not provide support for third party comment systems. Blogger's own native commenting system is really poor as it does not allow very basic comment features such as threading or Facebook login. Most serious Blogger users will turn to the two most popular third party comment systems, Disqus and IntenseDebate, for these additional features. However, under the default Blogger mobile theme setting, the mobile theme will not display the Disqus or IntenseDebate; only native comments will show up.

A hack which I found for successfully integrating Disqus into the mobile theme can be found on the unico-lab blog published 03/01/12, which forces the Disqus widget to render in the mobile theme by adding the mobile='yes' tag the widget tag in the HTML template editor for Blogger. This is the fix recommended for all widgets in Google's Blogger Blog in the post: http://code.blogger.com/2011/11/introducing-custom-mobile-templates.html.

I attempted to apply this fix to IntenseDebate, but this does not unpack the widget in the mobile theme. I contacted the IntenseDebate support team to see how this could work.

My email to the IntenseDebate:

> Hi I am trying to make IntenseDebate appear in the mobile Blogger
> template. I have activated this on my page. When I view the mobile
> version,
> (http://www.shinyhacks.com/2010/08/north-london-dim-sum-interactive-map.html?m=1)
> old Blogger comments appear. Desktop version shows IntenseDebate
> (http://www.shinyhacks.com/2010/08/north-london-dim-sum-interactive-map.html).
>
> According to Google's Blogger Blog, using the mobile='yes' tag should
> force a widget to appear in the mobile version
> (http://code.blogger.com/2011/11/introducing-custom-mobile-templates.html).
> I have attempted it using a fix described here:
> (http://unico-lab.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-make-blogger-mobile-working-with.html)
> but it isn't displaying.
>
> Are there any ways of making this work?

I received this support message from the Intense Debate support team on 06/01/12:

Hi Andrew,

At the moment Intense Debate can't be used with Blogger's mobile template. It's on our dev list, but there are certain limitations that prevent it from working properly.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

I'll keep this post updated if I hear anything more from their support.

For the time being however, Blogger and IntenseDebate users should disable the mobile theme. This is because comments written in the native comments system will overwrite all IntenseDebate comments for that post.