By: Jack Vinson

Jack Vinson — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 18:59:43 +0000

Regarding comment spam, you might want to look at using a “are you human” test in your comment form. I wasn’t sure about doing it, but once I made the switch, I find that I’ve had to weed out far less comments. In fact, in the last month, I haven’t received any spam comments and the number of real comments seems to have increased. It works so well that I’ve stopped pre-moderating comments.
Specifically, I started using HMPassphrase that works with MT. There is the small annoyance of having to modify your comment form (and the comment preview form).

By: J. Matthew Buchanan

J. Matthew Buchanan — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 18:34:57 +0000

Dennis — excellent post. Steve put some great thoughts out there and you’ve added some good ideas to the mix.
You know that I’ve been experimenting at Promote the Progress…Here’s some of my current thinking on blogs:
1. RSS — My site deals primarily with a very narrow topic – patent law and policy. The great majority of my audience comes to the site via direct visits and searches. Most of my audience has not adopted RSS. Because of this, I have designed my site for the web visitors. I still make RSS available, but I put the work into catering to the 95% that come to the site using traditional browsers. One great thing about blogs is the ability to tailor the actual site to web visitors while still providing content via RSS. You can have your cake and it eat too!
2. Blogrolls – I hate them. In fact, I have completely eliminated mine. The blogroll is an artifact of some blogging packages and, as everyone knows, is present primarily as a search engine manipulator. Anyone interested in the topics I discuss are probably already reading the same blogs that I read, so I don’t think a blogroll provides much utility to my readers. The visual clutter created on the site by the presence of a blogroll is too great a cost for such a limited benefit, in my opinion. There’s a side effect of blogrolls that is annoying too — every new blogger wants to be listed in your blogroll if you’ve got one…so they e-mail you and ask to be added. Arrrghhh.
3. Comments – I, like you, have struggled here. Comments are currently turned off at Promote the Progress simply because of the spam problem. The new version of MovableType does a good job of detecting comment spam, so I’m conisdering turning them on again. But, there’s another reason underlying my decision to turn comments off – the blog is my face to the professional community. Some commenters, while not spammers, post things that I would not. When this happens, is it enough for me to respond to these comments to clearly spell out my thoughts on the matter? Maybe, but that creates an additional workload that I’m not currently willing to take on. So, for now, I’m leaving them off.
4. Design — make the website visually pleasing and easy to navigate and use. I have completed a major transformation at Promote the Progress that focused on the design. I eliminated “clutter” items like the blogroll and date-based archive links (does anyone ever navigate a blog this way? Did anyone ever ask “hmmm, I wonder what Matt said in March of 2004?” I don’t think so….). Doug Sorocco is a design guru, and he helped me alot. Design is important and should be a primary concern for all blogs.
5. Architecture – What do I mean by this? Make the site (not talking about RSS here) easy to navigate and use. If a reader comes into an individual archive via a Google search, they should be able to jump to other related pages quickly. When visiting these archives, they should be immediately introduced to you and your site just like they would have had they come to the main or front page of the site. Keywords, tags and the like make this relatively easy to accomplish. Couple that with good design, and you’ve got a winning site.
I hope this helps. Make sure you let me know when you decide to redesign the blog!
Matt

By: Dave!

Dave! — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 03:19:27 +0000

Good insights!
I understand your position on comments–however, I think they are one of the things that makes a blog a blog. Without comments (and to some degree trackbacks) a blog is just a website that’s updated more frequently. To me, it’s the interaction between the author and the reader–to which comments are essential–that make a blog a *blog*.
The bigger name bloggers that don’t take comments, to me, aren’t blogging at all. They are just web based columnists with a very frantic publishing schedule.

Comments on: By Request: What Would I Do Differently If I Started Blogging Today?

By: Jack Vinson

By: J. Matthew Buchanan

By: Dave!