Thanks to Bernie I found two new interesting blogs this morning:
– the first is Karlin Lillington. Karlin is a longtime blogger who has been on a blogging sabattical (not entirely by choice) for some time now but who has just started blogging once more – welcome back Karlin.
– the second is Chris Horn. If you don’t know who Chris is, check out his first post where he talks about his background. Chris is definitely an interesting addition to the Irish blogosphere. I found his blog through Karlin’s!
One slight problem with both of these blogs, though is the lack of open commenting. By that I mean both blogs require you to log in to comment. I don’t have a login for Karlin’s blog so I can’t comment there and I have an old Blogger account that I could use to login to Chris’ to leave a comment but it is a personal account and not relevant to the comments I would want to leave.
Karlin used to allow commenting on her previous blog so I suspect that the issue on this blog is that she is unused to WordPress and it is a configuration error. If this is the case, and you are reading this Karlin, go to Options -> General and uncheck the “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” box (apologies if I am teaching granny how to suck eggs!).
In Chris’ case, I have no idea if this is intentional. If it is not and you want to open comments on your blog Chris, in your Blogger blog go to Settings -> Comments and in the “Who Can Comment?” drop-down, choose Anyone.
Having open comments on your blog is the only way to engage in a conversation. Otherwise you are not engaging with your readership, you are merely monologuing (sp?).
Ugh, I know. Nice timing – I just hit a site like this a few minutes ago. I really hope it’s unintentional or at worst, a misguided anti-spam policy.
karlin a granny? 🙂 i love getting the DART on a friday, i was returning from town at 9am this morning having done a hard days work podcasting a breakfast briefing, and I happen to get the biz section of the irish times left behind by the ‘southsiders’ so that way I get to read karlin among a million discarded herald am/metro’s.
tom I have a bigger problem with the chris horn comment page. its new blogger’esque comment login page. if i too am a “new” blogger, it wants my GOOGLE account details for this login. Now if chris was nasty this page could easily be a phishing page for google/gmail accounts.
this hit me in nov 2006, but its not a big issue out there
http://www.briangreene.com/bhg/2006/beta-blogger-not-better-blocker/
I had so many problems with spam on the chipswiththat.com blog for my slot on the Right Hook — in one case, hundreds of links posted over 2 days — that I’m very wary of allowing open blog comments that don’t require registration and then moderation. As an experiment I’ve set techno-culture to be open, but anyone should have been able to register — though I am indeed trying to figure out how the heck WordPress works and might not have ticked the right options. In the finest geek tradition I went straight to running the site without bothering with the manual. LOL
Karlin,
what works really well for me is turn on Akismet, set it to delete comments on posts over a month old, then, have all other comments go into moderation if the commenter hasn’t successfully commented on the site before.
If you need any help with any of this please feel free to get in touch,
Tom
Hi Tom,
Good to meet you on Saturday – sorry I couldn’t stay. In your post above, you say that
I’m entirely with you on this. Blogging works best when it’s a dialogue (diablog?) between blogger and reader rather than a monologue (monoblog?) simply on the part of the declaiming blogger. So, I agree as a matter of principle that comments should be open (and akismet is great at dealing with spam – over 200 today, all caught by it). For the same reason, I thoroughly disapprove of the usual Google requirement to login with a google account to comment on a google/blogger/blogspot blog (many/most of them don’t give the option to post without logging in).
Eoin.