Another blog update
December 3, 2009 at 6:30 PM by Dr. Drang
I’ve made two changes to the blog in the last few days:
- Traditional comments (not Twitter comments) have been turned on.
- My Twitter entries are no longer being posted here.
As I’ve said before, I didn’t implement commenting when I changed the blog from Movable Type to WordPress because I was tired of comment spam. As time went on, the thought of digging into my WordPress template and making a comment section consistent with the overall style of the blog gave me the willies, and I just kept putting it off. It turned out, though, that editing an existing template to make a reasonably decent looking comment section took just an hour or so.
The commenting rules are:
- Your first comment will come to me for moderation. Later comments will be posted immediately.
- Moderation will be done when I have time. I’ll try to be reasonably quick, but don’t be surprised if it takes a while. This is a hobby, not my profession.
- I will delete abusive comments, but maybe not immediately (see rule above).
- Comments that simply say “interesting post” will probably not pass through moderation. This seems harsh, but some spammers try to become unmoderated commenters by sending an innocuous first comment (see first rule).
- Posts will be closed to comments after 30 days.
- Comments can be in plain text or Markdown. Text that looks like a URL will be turned into a link automatically.
- The commenting rules and system may change if dealing with spam starts to take up too much of my time.
The experiment in commenting via Twitter is over. It worked fairly well, but had two big drawbacks:
- It forced you to the Twitter web page, even if you normally tweet via a standalone client. Often this forced a login step, taking away the spontaneity of Twitter.
- Sometimes 140 characters just isn’t enough.
The other Twitter experiment, gathering my tweets from the previous day and publishing them as a single post here, is also over. Although everything I write is a gem of transcendent brilliance, I’m tired of seeing Twitter posts that link to a regular post immediately below. There will be no more crossing of the streams.
As an adjunct to stopping the Twitter posts, I’ve also removed the links to the Twitterless RSS feeds. The feeds themselves, implemented through Yahoo! Pipes, still exist, so if you’ve subscribed that way your subscription will still work. But they’ll no longer give results different from the standard feeds.
