Oh, sorry not to post back here!
I figured out what was going on. It seems that discourse was working great all along.
What confused me was:
- I was seeing 404 errors in the Network tab of the Chrome Inspect window when I was embedding Discourse comments on a different domain to the discourse server here for example.. This is probably the expected behaviour of the mini-profiler which seems to be the thing that displays the loading time ?for admins only?
- I hadn’t read the documentation properly and was expecting to see an interface for entering comments appear on my site. Since I hadn’t actually commented on the blog articles there was very little being embedded in the page, only a link to the discourse server topic.
- My blog theme had a dark background and what was embedded in the blog page was not visible against the dark background. I fixed this with the CSS below.
div#discourse-comments {
background-color: white;
border-radius: 25px;
padding: 20px;
}