Category Archives: blogging
What can I say?
It’s customary to complain about ones own service providers. But compared to the competition, problems with wordpress are trivial: no more than minor annoyances. Which is not to say it’s immune to losing data, or royally fouling up writing/editing when faced with an unfamiliar platform: just that it’s comparatively stress-free.
In particular, relative to blogger, I’m happy to say wordpress just works. Blogger’s comment system just becomes more nightmarish by the … well, almost by the day. Here’s my latest attempt to comment on my brother’s blog:
OK, so it’s an error message. Wouldn’t be so bad if it were a one-off. And if I hadn’t just spent longer just rotating captcha crap in search of one I can read than it takes to write this little rant. And, most annoying of all to a geek, if the link to “Search the Blogger Help Forum” wasn’t such a cruelly misplaced come-on. Follow the link, and this one, to see what I mean.
Bah, Humbug.
POSTSCRIPT (nearly two days later)
It seems I’m not the only one to get that error code. Searching for it now turns up a result, saying in effect “we know it’s a bug”. Oh, and I came up against one of WordPress’s defects getting it to allow me any markup that puts the postscript reliably below the image.
Hurdles to discussion
+1 to Ortwin Glück!
The greatest virtue of blogs is their support for discussion. Putting silly barriers in the way of comments is counterproductive.
But Ortwin overlooks the worst case. Sure, jumping through hoops is annoying. But what’s altogether worse is sites that appear to accept comments, but when you’ve put the effort in require you to jump through hoops by stealth. Worst: those whose hoops are insurmountable: one of those eye tests (aka captchas) which my client may not even display, or which I may be unable to solve. Or blogs using blogger that expect you to send OpenID credentials, then throw up an error message when you do so.
For the record, no, this is not finger-pointing. I made no attempt to comment on Ortwin’s blog. Had I done so, I’m sure it would’ve been published with no problems.
niq's soapbox 