Theme Issues w/ IE + DISQUS

This past week at the Central Arkansas Refresh I got to talking to Keith Crawford about Disqus commenting platform and I was telling him that I felt like commenting platforms were going to be extremely competitive in the future.  Out of the box WordPress commenting platform works well but it leaves a lot to be desired, especially on blogs that get a lot of comments.  I feel like the entire future of the web is going to continue to evolve toward user generated content and one day users will be able to pretty much comment on any content they find.  When this day comes, commenting platforms will be all the rage.

As it is now, probably the biggest advantage to running commenting platforms like Disqus or IntenseDebate for my clients would be that they get multiple options for their site visitors to authenticate and leave comments.  Disqus offers Twitter, Facebook, as well as their own system.  We all know that the easier it is for a web user to do something, the more likely they are to do it.  This holds true for just about everything whether it’s email, a social application, or commenting.

Well, yesterday I decided to install Disqus on this blog and move over to their platform.  I had already installed Disqus a few times in the past for a few of my clients sites and had no issue to date.  Of course the minute I start working on something of my own things break down!

I was able to get it installed just fine, and inside of Firefox everything appears to be functioning correctly, but when I pulled my site up in IE to make sure that things rendered correctly, that’s when I found this: (Firefox on the left and IE on the right…)

I have no idea why this is breaking in IE and not in Firefox so I decided to just put off the upgrade until I had some time to devote to troubleshooting the issue a little bit closer.  I posted my frustration in a tweet and then moved onto another project.  Just a few minutes later I got a response back from @Disqus aka Giannii who is their community manager.  He asked me to send him some screenshots and links to the blog so he could take a look.  I decided to just leave the site broken in IE for now just so he could see exactly what it was doing. (so, if you are reading this in IE, switch to Firefox until we get this figured out).

Once I find out what’s breaking the issue I will likely post a follow up w/ an explanation of the issue but for now it beats me…