I received the following email earlier today with the subject heading "Haloscan is being discontinued." Haloscan is, for the non-techies in the audience, the application that this site has used for years. It powers the comments feature and the trackbacks at the bottom of each post.
So check this out:
I'm not real good at arithmetic, but this appears to be a threat. Tony Soprano says that if we don't pay up within a few days that my 10,000-or-so comments by users will be deleted.More at the link.
I switched back to Blogger commenting right away, when the JS-Kit buyout happened some time back. Glad I did ...
No comment system is perfect, but Blogger's own comments work pretty well for me. I'd prefer a manual trackback system, and I'd like more options for moderating comments and preventing spam, but Blogger's dependable. I had so much trouble with Haloscan, with undependability, and this was around the time of the buyout. It took me a lot of rigging around with the template to restore Blogger commenting. I actually had to create a new blog, and cut and paste the code from the new blog into American Power, then clicking preview to see if it looked okay. I wasn't sure, but it worked. Lost all the old commenting from Haloscan, and I had a couple of complaints from leftists who keep track of those things, like their snarky corrections to my entries, etc. But it's been so long now I can hardly remember.
I actually have less commenting going on around this blog lately, as I don't tend to it, to cultivate the community. That takes a lot of time, "returning" comments at other blogs, etc.. So, that's been a drag. Twenty or more comments in a thread nowadays is a big one.
So, don't be shy all you AmPower readers who lurk on the sidelines. I appreciate the feedback, and you can always drop your links here -- I don't mind
3 comments:
DD,
I've always commented, and i will always support AP (and before that Burkean reflections).
Never switched my commenting system, but I did adapt Blogger a little.
And if you want a link (to something you linked to until my health problesm stopped me from Blogging for a year):
http://valley-of-the-shadow.blogspot.com/
Also, something curious in the 2009 Blogosphere, after years of being on offense, the Left Bloggers are decrying the same tactics they used for the past 8 years (and as always, in chorus the Left says "That's Different," -- No it's not)
We on the Right learned defense first, and are having a fun time being on offense. True?
Vist the valley DD, there is always room for a comment of yours!
It's really very simple: switch the whole blog over to a WordPress based format. You can set up various keywords to trigger moderation, you can set particular IP addresses to moderate or block, you can allow blog registration and either require it or simply allow it, you can auto-moderate first-time commenters, just a lot of different things. And WordPress has a function which can transfer your entire site over, so you won't lose any history.
I don't know if you can impose WordPress on blogger.com; you might need a new url. But you can take your current url and have it auto-transfer over to the new one, so you'd be easily followed.
You can maintain a free-to-you site directly on wordpress.com (in which case your url would be something like americanpower.wordpress.com) or you can use an individual paid site host and have your own specific, owned-by-you url. That's how I do it, and my site costs me a whopping $79 a year.
There are a bunch of WordPress site themes available, many for free, some very similar to what you use now, and some dramatically different.
Composing in WordPress is really easy, in that it uses the same control tags as blogger, but you have a wider variety available. Or, you can use visual posting, and if you write on Microsoft Word or something like that, simply copy and paste.
I just got the same email as you and Doug Ross did, so I'll be trying to switch 2 blogs I run back to the standard Blogger system soon. It's a shame Haloscan is doing this, because they did have some good features IMHO, and now they're letting that go? Damn.
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