July 19, 2004
It's largely about usability
My friend Anton complains about the lack of comments on his blog:
In two months and a bit since opening comments, this blog received just eight, of which half were mere applause; and Blogger makes handling comments a bit of a nuisance. So I've turned commenting back off; and incorporated the four substantive comments as addenda to the original posts, which is what I do anyway when someone bothers to write to me.
It's because Blogger makes handling comments a pain in the ass that most of us don't bother, Anton, and nobody I know will submit comments by a separate channel (email in another software client) for possible posting at your convenience later. That's not how users expect the mechanism of a blog to work. You can continue to bitch about what other people will or won't do, complaining publicly about it, or you can take the actions necessary to actually induce people to leave comments: set yourself up using a genuine blogging system.
Posted by Russell Whitaker at July 19, 2004 09:23 AM | TrackBackEven in Blogger (which I use) you can use an independent commenting system instead of theirs.
I'm using Haloscan.com to manage both my comments and my trackbacks (which Blogger doesn't even offer). Haloscan offers real-time posting of comments (no approval queues), but the blog owner can still edit/delete comments after the fact. I've had no problems with it so far...
If you can handle inserting some basic HTML code (that they provide) into your Blogger template, then you're all set.
I've been able to add both Atom and RSS syndication, a blogroll, a page counter, technorati, a site search feature and some listing services to my Blogger site, all with minimal difficulty.
My headache remains getting image files onto my posts.
Posted by: KipEsquire on July 19, 2004 09:41 AM"complains" should read "reports".
Exactly one person has ever shown a sign of giving a damn whether or not I make it easy for other people to write on my website. If you want to continue to bitch about it in *your* space, that's your privilege, but I wish you would not presume that I share your preferences; that presumption has led you to further misunderstanding.
(As long as we're carping about commenting convenience, why is <em> not allowed here?)
Posted by: Anton Sherwood on July 20, 2004 11:58 AM