There are two oft-requested features that we really want to get out the (metaphorical) door already.

1. Content importing
2. Blog widgets

We’ve done a lot of work on both, but we keep turning our attention to new things that seem to crop up daily. At the moment, changes are being made to the backend so that large updates to Disqus won’t actually break anything. Sorry for the wait time, friends.

Many people are asking about customizing the comment system. With a little knowledge of CSS, you can tweak to your heart’s content. Earlier this week, we put up some documentation to help: http://disqus.com/custom-css/

It’s been exactly one month since we launched our public beta. 4 weeks! Here are a couple videos of me (Daniel) talking about Disqus: [intruders.tv] and [hyveup].

Recently, we’ve been organizing and prioritizing bugs and features for Disqus. Above is a glimpse at some of the tickets in our bug tracker as of this morning. If you’ve ever emailed us a feature suggestion or even passively made a request on your blog, we heard you and have made note!

One thing that we have been giving a lot thought to is the notion of community. A goal with Disqus is make it incredibly effortless for blogs to build their communities. Currently, many of our new blog friends are jumping on board for the powerful simplicity of the comment system. Moving forward, we’d like to place more emphasis on the ability to track comments and replies. We have plenty of ideas around this and hopefully we can show you soon.

This morning, I read this story on TechCrunch about people trolling through blog comments. When we started Disqus, one of the promises we wanted to make was the ability to curb comment trolling. We were starting a service that focused completely on improving web discussions; who better to address this than us? So we built a reputation system (Clout, we call it) into the backend of Disqus that goes beyond the typical nominal people scoring mechanisms of many sites. I’m happy to say that we’re starting to see people on Disqus make good use of that system. As Disqus grows, we’ll keep an eye on how the entire community interacts with it and how much value site owners get out of it.

The last “T” in this post is “Turkey.” That is, have a wonderful Thanksgiving to everyone out there that celebrates it.

There has been a lot of talk recently about who did or who did not attend this year’s Blog World Expo, which just ended in Las Vegas yesterday. Yes, the reports are true: Disqus was indeed a no-show. Alas, we were not there to hand out branded schwag, exchange business cards and RSS feeds, or even life stream/live blog the experience.

While we regret not being able to see our blogging friends, we felt our time was better spent working on some very cool new additions. There are a number of fixes and small changes already online, but we’ll have bigger things to show once the weekend is over.

This is just a small Monday morning update to start the week off. Last night, we made available the feature to export all of your content from Disqus in XML format. This is accessible under Integration Settings. We don’t believe in data lock-in and wanted to make sure this was immediately available. There is a lot more underway with exporting and importing to specific publishing platforms, and we’ll have that accessible in the near future.

Kerro, a new Disqus member, thought it was a good idea to start a community area for bloggers and webmasters. Ideally, here people can help each other strengthen and promote their blogs through the power of the Disqus network. We think it’s a good idea as well — feel free to contact Kerro if you’d like to help maintain the community forum.

Hello fellow commenters,

This post will be about features and fixes that are quickly coming. But first of all, welcome to our many new users from Tumblr! New Disqus user Rod from ToldorKnown made a helpful post for Tumblr users.

We just made a small update to the general integration instructions. This should make integrating with custom websites and platforms much easier. We’ve also been hearing a lot of requests for greater customization — we will have custom CSS editing from your Disqus account very soon. In the meantime, we will put up extended documentation for adding custom rules right in your own stylesheet.

If you take a look at our front page, you may notice that the Top Discussions are a bit arbitrary. I admit that this needs some, well, a lot of work. Expect this soon. Feel free to berate us publicly and privately if expectations are not met.

We’ve been hearing a lot about being able to import and export your comment data as well. We’ve been asked for our thoughts regarding this. The Disqus answer: We believe in it and we have this implemented in development. It’s being tested and will be online soon. Why the wait? Import/export features of some other services were found to be broken and insecure — ours will not be.

We’ve just added the ability to subscribe to any individual person’s comments. Just look under “Feeds” on that person’s profile. Now in addition to following someone on Disqus, you can add their comment threads to your feed reader. You can view your feed on your profile.

Today, our friends at Tumblr put out a fantastic new release of their tumblog tool. You want Disqus on your Tumblr, you say? We’ve just added a new Tumblr button to our integration page. Just go to http://disqus.com/integration-start/_YOUR_FORUM_ for full instructions.