Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Looking For Suggestions

Some of my regular readers have been having less than satisfactory experiences with commenting under Blogger.

I write this blog mostly because I enjoy the thinking experience, and it obliges me to carefully examine the news and events going on in the world more critically than I might otherwise do. However, I also enjoy the feedback and comments come in from the readers of this space.

I have several possible options, and I'd like some feedback from you as to what you'd like to see. I've listed the options I can think of below, but I'm sure there's others that I haven't thought of, so feel free to put them forward:

Option 1: Disable the "catchme" option in the blogger comment handler. This is the part of the comment page where blogger insists that you type in the text from a graphic of distorted text. (The idea is to shut out spam bots)

If I do this, I'll have to enable comment moderation (I review comments before they appear) so that I can delete any spam that arrives. I don't especially want you to have to read about the latest in rude sites, or "personal enhancement" ads.

Option 2: Try a different commenting engine like HaloScan. (Preferences, thoughts about Haloscan?)

Option 3: Move to another blog hosting service like TypePad.com? (Any suggestions - I'm not wildly familiar with other blog hosting services, so your experiences can tell me a lot)

Option 4: Self Host the blog on one of my own servers. This probably means me taking on an additional maintenance task that I'm a little reluctant to tackle right now - I barely manage to keep my "motley crew" network running at the best of times. Carries a modest cost of a domain name registration - $60/year or so. Also could be a little slow at times since my link is not blindingly fast on uplink (256 Mbps, I think)

Option 5: Purchase domain and hosting time on a commercial hosting service like DotEasy. A little bit of setup time, but modest, and relatively easy for me to do. Like option 4, carries a cost with it.

Option 6: Leave it where it is? Blogger's had a bit of a bumpy ride through the transition from "Blogger Beta" to "New Blogger". Is it worth riding it out and seeing what happens?

Post a comment, or you can e-mail me at crystalgaze04 at yahoo dot ca.

Note: I will delete this post after this coming weekend.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And another option to consider would be to run as a forum. This would give you the ability (as you do now) to post your articles, and additionaly you would be able to categorize the topics. As well, because you would be the forum moderator, you can control the threads (thus accomplishing the anti-spam messaging)

Might be an interesting alternative

SB

Anonymous said...

Scout's new format, wordpress, seems more user friendly as a blog format. Haloscan seems to also work well too. This one is a bit of pain with the log in, sometimes I don't log in, type a comment, go to publish it and it disappears.

Anonymous said...

Scout @ Harper Valley that is...

evilscientist said...

The advantage of running on your own servers is that you have complete control over the look and feel of your site, as well as what you can offer. Speed probably isn't too much of a factor since I only run on a standard cable modem and it isn't an issue over at Castle Evil.

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