I’ve been experimenting with adding third party messaging and sharing applications to tumblr.

Disqus works well, in that it allows visitors to comment directly on individual posts on your page, rather than by reblogging it themselves - which they can’t do if they’re not tumblers.

Sometimes I’d rather see timely (and more directly personal) acknowledgement and sentiments rather than the convoluted ‘hit and miss’ dashboard notification.

To add it to your tumbler, you need to join Disqus as an administrator, set some parameters, and then copy the code into your theme’s HTML. If you’re not familiar with navigating the code, it might be a little tricky, but for anyone who’s already fooled around with customizing their theme, the instructions provided by Disqus are clear - and they work.

The option to display messages received, requires some more code ( again, settings can be adjusted) to be copied and pasted into your Info, and those messages then appear under your avatar and where your other information is displayed.

Joining Disqus as a commenting member (as opposed to a Disqus blog owner) is something I did a few months ago, and it’s a handy way to leave authenticated comments on this and other social networking sites. But you don’t need to join to be able to comment; you can simply leave your message as a ‘guest’.

Next discovery: A modified way to send and share sites.
Stay tuned :)