Do you know, after six years of being on Blogger, I've only just now realized that there's a spam filter for comments? Yes, there is, and it answers the question that had been bugging me in a low-level way: why certain good comments which showed up in our email are mysteriously missing from the blog. I note this with particular apologies to Kevin J Jones, who several months back commented with a most fascinating link about modern misandrists which I would have liked to discuss with everyone at the time, and Brandon, several of whose comments (including the "trolleyology" reference) were stuck in spam for no discernible reason.
And this is why we flirt, every now and then, with the idea of switching to Wordpress. Anyone have any recommendations or cautions on the alternate blogging platforms?
Links of Note
4 hours ago
8 comments:
I can't say I've used many other of the popular blogging platforms, but I can give glowing endorsements of Wordpress! I use it for a blog, as well as two other sites, and love everything about it. The only complaint I have is saving drafts - sometimes the URL will still have the date of the initial draft instead of the date published, but for whatever reason, when I press "Save Draft", it fixes it. I'm probably doing something wrong...
All I can say about Typepad is that, for $50 a year, it's worked pretty well for me.
One reason I chose it was: I was a little afraid to use a free service like Blogger, because I thought maybe you get what you pay for.
But another reason was that I liked the user interface, and I was grumpy to discover that the WYSIWYG user interface does not currently work for mobile devices, including my iPad.
The only way to post from the iPad or iPhone is first with an html-free email, which from the iPad can contain at most one photo. And such a post goes up immediately; as far as I can tell it cannot be scheduled or saved as a draft. Once you have posted it, you can go to the non-WYSIWYG user interface and update the HTML to include the tags and links. But you still can't add more photos to it till you get to a real computer.
It's not a deal-breaker for me personally, but you might want to know this. If you're thinking of switching platforms, find out how they work with your mobile device before deciding.
I switched to Wordpress and I'm pretty happy with it. The downsides are that some of its tag features are better suited to interacting with other Wordpress blogs (rather than your own blog's content) and that some of the sidebar doo-dads I had been using didn't work anymore.
Plus sides - at least from when I switched over last Fall - it has a much better editor (Blogger editor was driving me bananas!) and definitely the spam filter (I had completely shut down my comments on Studeo because it was such a mess). I also like the layered comments (you can comment to the post in general or to a particular comment) and so many pieces of the puzzle work seamlessly.
From a visitor's standpoint, I much prefer the comment boxes in Wordpress. I don't like that Blogger insists on opening a separate, narrow window for comments, instead of just showing comments below the post.
What I always appreciate is having a checkbox for "subscribe to comments on this thread" when leaving a comment. That way you don't have to navigate back to the post in order to see if anyone responded to your comment.
Since you asked! : )
Hey, Agellius! Since you're here... Thanks for your normalcy in the combox for that sleazy piece about perverts loving modesty at Vox Nova. I wouldn't have commented over there for the world, but it was good to see you and Thales standing up for the majority of conservative Catholic kids who both knew better and acted better. Geez.
In fairness to your powers of observation, the spam filter is only about a year old.
I've done things with WordPress (I occasionally blog on a group blog that uses the platform); they've done a very good job recently of making it a user-friendly and powerful platform. I find it a bit more hassle to sign in and out sometimes, but on pretty much every other point it has advantages over alternatives.
Have to agree about the aesthetic appeal of Wordpress.
For those using Blogger (as I do), DISQUS is a popular comments platform that can be integrated with Blogger.
http://disqus.com/
and Blogger (Google) has a new version in the works:
http://draft.blogger.com/
I agree. Signing in and out on WordPress is a pain, especially since I share my computer with another WordPress user (my daughter).
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