Unable to load Disqus

I can't get my block to show correctly. Once it did for a second and then changed back to the regular "We were unable to load Disqus. If you are a moderator please see our troubleshooting guide."

I'm trying to set it up to ONLY use the like/dislike buttons at the bottom of each of my pages. I have permissions set to allow disqus, I have tried the drupal comments disabled & enabled for the one content type, and of course the module is enabled too.

I have gone all through this guide http://docs.disqus.com/help/83/ but I can't get it to work. I looked at configuration variables http://docs.disqus.com/help/2/ but that's a bit confusing - you see, if you go to the disqus.js file in the module, you can see all these variables at the top, all left without an values. I was NOT told anywhere related to setting up with drupal - like at the main instructions disqus.com/admin/drupal/ or on the drupal page, http://drupal.org/project/disqus - to change this. I tried putting the info in, but that didn't help the situation.

I set it up with "block" in the .../admin/settings/disqus page, following the instructions here: http://seanreiser.com/projects/2008/05/06/howto-integrate-disqus-drupal

And found what I think is the code he mentions in step 5 here: http://docs.disqus.com/developers/universal/

So I copied that code into a block but it doesn't work either. It loads with the little image of Disqus for a while (in firefox it's stuck with that picture, in chrome it goes back to the "cannot load disqus...troubleshooting guide" line. (same result as the disqus-generated block "DISQUS: Comment" )

I have tried making sure the API key is entered at ../admin/settings/disqus, I got the key from: http://disqus.com/api/get_my_key/

PLEASE tell me what I'm supposed to be doing to set this up? Thank you!