Tickets for the re-publica 2012 are now available. Go.
The (I think there were 500? Please correct me.) early bird blogger tickets were sold out in about half an hour. It’s that good.

Scene from "The IT Crowd" S04E05

Instead of writing a long, long article in which I’d just get upset, here’s what really grinds my gears considering the tech/digital side of studying at the University of Hamburg. It’s all stuff people afraid of or uncomfortable with technology just do, but I find it hard to bear from time to time.

• The presentations and lecture notes are made available online, yeehaw, but in a pretty subotpimal - and by suboptimal, I mean shitty :) - way. You have to navigate to the single dates of a lecture. But not all the time, sometimes the data sits on the lecture’s ‘home page’. Inconsistency ftw!
• Therefore, after every lecture/every day, we practically have to log in to the crappy university software and search for the new lecture notes. Instead of getting a frakkin’ email. I’m not arguing that that’s hard, I’m not that lazy. But it’s so unsophisticated once you realize how easy everything could be in times of email, dropbox and all that stuff.
• Instead, we get emails that inform us about every uninteresting event that’s happening, but:
• No email when an important deadline’s up.
• We get files named like this: Ppt0000009.pdf
• And that are the bad ones, I admit. But the good ones are like this: Lecture_1.pptx. Don’t mind telling us of which lecture!
• We get 160-pages-documents as .doc instead of .pdf.
• Today, we got a five-step manual as .pptx file.
• We get mail addresses that follow the scheme firstname.lastname@studium.uni-hamburg.de. That’s fine if you’re going for the worst email address possible. The university owns the domain uhh.de. That’s not great either, but at least it’s not that long. If I was a famous professor and member of the University of Hamburg, I’d be ashamed instead of proud to give away an email address of the mentioned scheme.
  It basically says: “My university sucks at everything that has to do with IT.” And that is just sad for a place that should be innovative, striving after progress and all that stuff. Where do we get when in 2011 at a university in the country of engineers, the most simple tools technology gives us are used with the expertise of a three-year-old?

As you can see under every blogpost and in the now updated contact section, I slapped the Disqus comment system over this blog. As this is a barebone-slim-minimal kind of blog that’s hosted accordingly, it lacks a database and everything else a comment system would require. I liked Disqus and really didn’t want to manage the comments with Facebook’s system. So here we are.

Disqus and Jekyll
In combination with Jekyll, the awesome static site generator, theres two things to Disqus. First, getting it to work and then fitting it into your own blog with CSS. Disqus tells you how to do that. In short, you just:

• Embed Disqus’s Universal Code at the bottom of your post.md in the _layouts folder.
• Exchange your disqus_shortname for the example in the code. The comment system should work now. For a comment count on your index page, continue:
• Paste Disqus’s Coment count code in your default.md, right before the </body> tag
• Put in your shortname again.
• Whereever on your index.md you want to put the articel’s comment counts, you need to put a link that tells Disqus that it has to look it up for a comment count. That’s #disqus_thread. Since we’re using Jekyll, and with it YAML and Liquid and whatnot, it makes sense like this:
  <a href="/#disqus_thread">Comments</a>

The necessity of the slash before #disqus_thread depends on how you style your permalinks (consult your config.yml). My permalink style lacks .html or / at the end, so for the comment count lookup to work, I needed to put it there. Cost me half a day. Kudos again to the wonderful @talinee who located the error in the end.
I couldn’t get the whole data-disqus-identifier thing to work, but it works fine without. As long as I don’t migrate the blog, at least.

Disqus and CSS
Probably it isn’t helpful for anyone but me, but here’s the CSS I styled Disqus with. For applying custom CSS to Disqus, just log in to it, go to disqus.com/admin/settings/appearance/ and paste yours in the Custom CSS box at the bottom.

For additional info, you can check out my setup on github.