Dave Caolo

Every so often, the discussion regarding comments on weblogs resumes. This week John Gruber got the ball rolling on Daring Fireball. Shawn Blanc and Marco Arment responded in favor of disabling comments. I agree with all three, but my reasons are much simpler:

• Comment management is very time consuming.
• The vast majority of comments detract from the experience of reading a blog.

Management

If all I had to do was respond to constructive comments, I’d keep them enabled. However, when I accepted comments, I spent most of my time repelling spam, adding IPs to blacklists and hitting the delete button. By the way, that’s a war than can never be won. Therefore, it’s a waste of time. As WOPR will tell you, “The only winning move is not to play.”

Trolls

I deal with hundreds of comments per day at TUAW. Many of them are left by thoughtful readers. Many are not. While Marco contends that comments follow a many-to-one model (many commenters converse with one blog author), I say comments are many-to-many. As any database designer will tell you, that’s a no-no.

Comments quickly devolve into an off-topic discussion among the commenters, of which the original post’s author is omitted. That discussion too often mimics the vibe of a junior high school playground. No one is better for it and the blog owner is forced to either ignore it, leaving a mess on their blog, or play referee. I don’t have time for that.

If you want to respond to something I’ve written, do so via email or Twitter. Better yet, write a post on your own blog. For now, comments are closed.

The folks at Posterous have made it dead-simple to register a domain and set up a blog. In fact, a single click takes care of the entire process. No DNS record, no A-record, nothing.

As if I needed another reason to absolutely love Posterous.

VaultPress is a premium WordPress security and backup service, now in private beta. I’ve submitted an application. In the meantime, here’s the home grown backup solution I’ve been using.

I noticed this today and I’m elated about it. When you’ve got a slew of tabs open and you click a link that opens a new one, it opens immediately to the right of the tab you’re currently in. Previously, it opened at “the end of the line.” I often have 30 or 40 tabs open at once, and all that scrolling was a disruption.

Hurrah for this small but welcome feature.

A good reminder from Jared Earle boils down to this: Someday the legions of readers you’re after will arrive. All at once. If you’re running WordPress, you’ll want WP Super Cache installed, or they’ll only find a crippled server.

[Via Daring Fireball]

WordPress’s popularity is exploding, and with it a cottage industry of premium themes. The most fashionable feature magazine layouts, jQuery sliders and corporate-style designs. Amateur designers and weekend warrior types are mimicking these things on their own sites.

What ever happened to a plain old blog layout? In most cases it’s the most appropriate choice. When a blog I’ve enjoyed for months or years adopts one of these themes for no good reason, I’m disappointed. It’s like being at a concert where the band has gotten “artsy” with weird arrangements of all their songs. I want to say, “Your songs are awesome as written. You’re just ruining the experience.”

Several months ago, I listed the plug-ins I add to every WordPress installation. This post is an update to that list. Here are my standard WordPress plug-ins.

1. Akismit eliminates comment spam and trackback spam effectively. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key to enable it. I occasionally see something sneak through, but those occurrences are the exception, not the rule. Akismit is the first plug-in I set up.
2. Thank Me Later sends first-time commenters a single email thanking them for their participation. Customize the time delay between receipt of the comment and deployment of the email, the body of the message itself and more. It’s not essential, but a nice touch.
3. WordPress.com stats provides real-time statistics in your dashboard. Again, you’ll need a WordPress.com API key to enable this one.
4. WordPress Database Backps does just what the name implies — creates a backup for your blog’s (or WP-powered site’s) database files. For some real fun, check out my super-simple instructions for setting up automated, off-site backups.
5. Share This lets visitors share your articles with their favorite social sites without having to leave your blog.
6. All in One SEO Pack certainly isn’t a replacement for SEO best practices (see “WordPress and SEO“), but it makes certain aspects easy.
7. Subscribe to comments allows readers to receive email notifications of responses to posts they’ve commented on. It fosters conversation and gives readers following the thread a reason to return.
8. Related posts scours your tags each time you publish a post to find older entries that are a match. Those are listed just above the comment box. This gives readers a reason to dig into your archives.

So there you have it, my basic WordPress starting point. What’s yours?

I’ve spent the last few weeks with Posterous, a relatively new blogging platform from Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan. The result is both a modest record of my travels and a powerful enthusiasm for the service.

Posterous is going to be huge.

I’ve used every blogging platform I’ve found, including (but not limited to) WordPress, Typepad, MoveableType, Squarespace, Vox, Livejournal, Blogger and Textpattern. The easiest among those are the hosted solutions, like Typepad, Livejournal, Blogger, Squarespace and Vox (Note: Typepad, Livejournal and Vox are all products of Six Apart). WordPress and MoveableType are (usually) self-hosted and require the blogger* to create and link to a database.

After installation is complete, they all require additional fiddling. Customizing the layout, design, colors, graphics etc. takes time. Adding something like an image gallery is even more time consuming, and typically requires a plug-in which you must find, upload, configure and test on your own.

By contrast, here’s how you create a complete blog with Posterous: Send an email message to post@posterous.com. That’s it.

Here’s how you create a full-featured, thumbnailed photo gallery with built-in navigation on Posterous: Email your photos to post@posterous.com.

Want to post a video? Same thing. It’ll even encode it for you. Send nearly any codec you want.

It’s brilliant because there’s nothing to learn. Everyone knows how to send an email message. Additionally, there’s nothing to download, install or configure. You can use the email client you already know; the email client you probably have with you all day via your laptop, phone or iPod. Additionally, you can have Posterous notify your other accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, each time an update is posted.

I oversee many bloggers at my day job and some are more technically savvy than others. We use WordPress, which I love, but does pose a challenge for some of the writers. However, they’re all proficient with email. If I could simply tell them, “Just email your posts and pictures to this address and you’re done,” they’d fall down with gratitude and relief.

The sticking point right now is the lack of customization. If I’m going to embrace Posterous for work, I’ve got to be able to customize the CSS and other layout features. But that’s an extreme case.

For the vast majority of people, Posterous is a very desirable option. Sachin and Garry took an incredible idea — get out of the way and let the blogger write via a familiar and nearly ubiquitous tool — and executed it wonderfully. I can’t wait to see where this goes.

*Some web hosting companies provide a one-click install for WordPress and MoveableType.

David Pogue nails the tech web with one simple sentence:

“Seems like every time an exciting, breakthrough product comes along, certain readers trip over themselves to disparage it—even though they’ve never even tried the thing.”

Here’s how it works. Company A releases a novel and interesting product or service. The “cool” response is to point out why it’s crap. It’s unfortunate that weblog comments have become a liability instead of an asset, but it’s true. Lifehacker has the best solution.

Squarespace is a web-based publishing tool, often used by bloggers. It’s very slick and unlike others like Typepad and hosted WordPress. Today they revealed plans for an iPhone app, which I’m very eager to see. Good luck to them.