I'm going to be moving from Blogger sometime soon. I've got as far as buying razorbladeoflife.co.uk, but don't bother looking there yet because there's nothing to see. Ro is lending a hand and I've explained my requirements, which mostly have to do with comments. I don't know if we'll find a way of sorting it all out from the start, but this is what I've said.
- There must be a way of subscribing to comments, I don't expect people who respond to a post to have to keep coming back to see what else has been said.
- They shouldn't have to belong to Wordpress, Google or anything else to leave a comment.
- Ideally, I'd like one-off approval of commenters, I neither want people to have to go through complicated word verification nor be bothered by spam myself (Blogger)
- If someone says they will subscribe to comments, I don't want them to have to say it again in an email, especially one that starts 'Howdy' (Wordpress).
- I want them to be able to put in the name they want to be known by - I sometimes have to put Zed because Z isn't long enough (Disqus).
- Once they leave a comment once, I want their details to be remembered if they wish, so that they don't have to fill it all in again. It's no good ticking a Google identity box if you don't want your full name going into the comment box and a guest signing-in isn't remembered (Disqus).
- Regarding the blog itself, I want to be able to move all posts and comments too.
I don't think any of this is a whole lot to ask, but we'll see. I heard on the radio recently that MySpace has just had a relaunch, but those who blogged on it had their entire blogs wiped, with no warning. I'd have been devastated, frankly, I love my blog.
24 comments:
Gosh, very brave of you. Tempted to do the same thing, as Blogger's getting on my nerves. Questions flooding in:
Did you buy the domain name from 123.com?
How will you manage the blog design and functions? Layout, following etc. etc.
Goodness - it seems that you are very much in the mood for change.
I look forward to further developments.
Yes, I did. And I'll tell you when I've done it - right now, my biggest problem is exporting my blog onto my hard drive - it's such a massive file it's taking ages and the connection just dropped and I lost it - I'll have to disable the sleep function on the computer. After dinner, I think.
I hadn't really thought of it like that, Liz, but you could be right. I'm only wanting to leave Blogger because of the comment problem. And August is the month when I don't have school stuff to occupy me, so I've got the opportunity to do it.
Howdy!
There must be other systems besides the big two - it will be very interesting to hear about your experiences.
What is a complementary close for a note started with "Howdy"? Maybe YO! will do ...
YO!
I think that there are blogger settings for most of this stuff - shouldn't really be a problem if you select some options. . .
Howdy, Mago. I'm rather relying on Ronan if I have any problems.
Hi, Goatman - yes, most of them are features on Blogger, but the wv is so difficult that I don't like to put people through the bother of it. And not everyone can use Open ID, so the only option is to have moderation on, which means I have a lot of spam to delete and have to keep checking emails to make sure comments are published asap. If Blogger allowed for comments to be switched off after a few days it'd help, but you have to turn them off on individual posts.
Howdy! I've been thinking of doing the very same thing. Best wishes on the transition!
You'll always get spam. There is no way to stop it. There are forums telling people with no money and no sense how to solve all their financial problems using comments to make money.
You need to have a way of turning comments off on older posts, if you get spam.
And it's a good idea if comments with URLs automatically go to moderation.
Good luck getting it all out of blogger - make sure you have auto-backup (daily is best but usually costs more than weekly, unless you are me ;)) from your host.
Not for me to interfere, but are you cracking a peanut with a sledgehammer? Building an entire new website in order to get rid of spam commentsseems a bit drastic. And you've no guarantee that it'll work - you might get even more once they find you! Will your new filters be better than Blogger's??
What would be useful would be for Blogger to provide the option of barring anonymous comments, as I've proposed to them many times. That'd kill a lot of it, at least in the short-to-medium term. I really don't understand why they haven't implemented this obvious solution.
Well, we'll see - I'm not going to delete this one anyway. And it really is a complete pain - Open ID worked fine and I'd have gone with that, but that meant that BW and possibly others couldn't comment.
I know absolutely nerthing about OpenId, but if the only issue is that some people aren't signed up to it - well, isn't that their problem rather than yours?
Besides, they can always comment as 'Name/URL', in fact I'm just doing exactly that to prove the point.
You'll be going for flying lessons next.
oh well.. thats every blogger's wishlist, isnt it?
i hope that its all met.. and yes, we love ur blog way too much too.
It's always my fault. I'm quite used to it ;)
Some of the comments above show just how little the comments problems are generally understood.
Hi Hi
Good luck with that darling. Fingers crossed the migration works!
Roses
xxx
I'm not going to exclude anyone who would like to leave a comment just because they don't use the same blogger as I do. Even Wordpress and Blogger don't work particularly well together. I know I'll have to keep the Blogger blog up anyway, because I'll need a Blogger id to sign in to comment with others.
I agree, HDWK, so why can't they get their act together and give it to us?
I've sat at the controls during flights in light aircraft, all way too complex for me, ElizT! But there are other things I don't rule out...
Blogger did put pretty well all spam into the junk folder and I used to leave comments completely open. But there were just so many of them, I was getting dozens a day and a few started to creep into the comment box. Open ID should work, but BW found it didn't for her.
In short, I'm fed up with not having the controls I want. My son's job is building websites and he's willing to help, so why not, while I'm in the mood for change!
Your list of requirements is a description of Blog Utopia. Good luck in getting it all up and running to those specs. If anyone can do it, it will be you, Z.
Hope you're putting on your Determined Hat. :)
But it's not that demanding really - all the platforms are pretty close, but each one has a different issue that they won't sort out. I'm as concerned that the person who comments isn't annoyed as that I'm not as the blogger.
good luck, sugar! i appreciate the effort required to make commenting easier. xoxoxo
Hey Z! Your ambition pushes ever onwards! I bought my indigoroth.com domain through blogger for $10/year, and they instantly transferred the entire blog over, including comments. I don't use word verification, and very rarely get spam, so maybe spam is worse on the free blogger domains? They're probably easier to identify as bloggers than my domain, certainly. Then again, it could be that I'm just not popular ;) Indigo x
Ronan reckons it's because I blog daily, pretty well, so am high on search engines. I will have some respite for a while anyway because my position will drop right down. And yes, the point about not being easily identified as a blog is a good one too.
Movable Type used to be the bees knees and all the early bloggers who wanted a CMS but didn't want to use Blogger used it. Somehow it's now fallen out of fashion, but I have no idea why as I think it's great.
My installation was built 10 years ago now by one of my then-readers, and does all of those things you require (I choose not to have subscription to comments because I think people get too much junk in their e-boxes as at is is).
I have full control over my images, but it does require me to edit them into the size I want, and upload then to my server before I include them in a post.
I also have Google protected comments so that I (or others) can put things that won't be read by search engines.
The bloggers who get hundreds of comments are ones I tend not to subscribe to, but if I know the blogger will probably reply to a comment or if other commenters are interesting or funny, I like to know about it. I can call back on the offchance, but I find that more trouble than just getting them by email, reading and deleting them. And it's one's choice whether to subscribe, of course, one doesn't have to do it.
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