j's scratchpad

Back in early February, I wrote about Shimon’s scheme of commenting on a Frassle blog starting a new blog in Frassle. Well, he has rethought how Frassle does comments and plans to revamp the system. I think his new plan for the system is probably a good idea. I wouldn’t say I was disappointed to automatically get a Frassle blog when I commented on his post, but I didn’t particularly want another blog and was a little put off at suddenly having a fourth blog. I can imagine that if more people knew that was the plan, those who don’t want a blog wouldn’t comment, as Shimon suggests.

It’s also true that registering to comment may sound clunky, but that’s basically what happens when someone comments on a Manila blog. That form people fill out with their name, e-mail address, URL, and comment is actually a registration form that automatically makes the commentor a member of the blog.

One of the things I like about comments on Frassle is how they become part of the blog post by appearing below the post. They aren’t separate like the comments on this blog. If someone wants to read a comment, she has to make an additional click to read what’s posted.

One of the things I don’t like about comments on Frassle is that I feel like instead of commenting on his post, I need to post about it on my own blog. Then, I get into a debate about which blog is a more appropriate venue for a response. I chose this one because there have been other posts in this space about the “comment on your own blog” debate. Had I chosen my Frassle blog, my words would appear below his post on the subject, which would be much better. (That’s Frassle’s way of doing a TrackBack link, but it doesn’t seem to work outside of Frassle.)

Something to be wary of, if you are like me and like to be able to return to edit your words, is the way it sounds like Frassle is going to use cookies to remember who you are so you can edit your comments. If you want to return to edit your comments, you might want to register for Frassle. Otherwise, when the cookie in your browser expires, you lose access to your words.

It’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with for his new commenting system.

Of course, what Shimon doesn’t realize is the reason why no one’s commenting is because he only has a few blog readers and we have nothing to say about his blog posts. (Actually, if you enter his feed URL into the Share Your OPML search box, it comes back with no subscribers, but if you fidget around enough, you can find out how many subscribers he has by browsing through other people’s feeds. Weird. {Some of those links may be restricted to people who have registered for SYO.})

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2004 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.