Sunday, 3 July 2011

thing #2 - blogs

The 600+ blogs listed on the CPD23's delicious list is, I admit, somewhat daunting when taken as a whole: my approach was to filter by tags and then browse through looking for names that caught my eye. Not exactly scientific, but it's better than giving in to choice paralysis, and has led me to some interesting blogs.

(Props to The Library Scull for drawing my attention to Reading's ThisIsMe project, which I'll be coming back to in Thing #3.)

Heading out to leave comments on a selection of new-to-me blogs did remind me just how much I loath captchas, though. I know why people use them, but the extra step is off-putting, and the accessibility issues are manifest. (I'm mildly dyslexic and sometimes really struggle with them; I know others find them essentially impossible.)

Also it really struck me how distancing having a comment referred for moderation can be. Again, I recognise why people choose that setting, but the past couple of hours reading did prompt me to go and check my Blogger settings.

I had moderation set only for posts over 14 days, and I've tweaked that up to 30 days. Most of the issues I've had with spam comments, both here and on the group blog I manage for work, have been on older posts, so that seems like a fair balance, especially once you add in Blogger's automatic spam comment filtering, which I've found pretty decent (only one false-positive to date).

* Man Blogging, after Gabriel Metsu, by Mike Licht, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

2 comments:

Alice SSL said...

Hello to a fellow Alice! Thank you for your comment. Your library/institution sounds really interesting. Good luck with the move.

Lyn Bailey said...

Hi Alice, You commented on my blog - only just getting on to thing2! I found the email for moderation after my holidays. I am trying out wordpress and thought I had set it to allow comments without moderation. Obviously not!I have retried the settings - not finding it as easy as blogger.