Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Recent Blog Tool Comparison
Susannah Gardner compares blogging applications in her article Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool? over at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism's Online Journalism Review. Very helpful summary/discussion for those of us thinking of making a switch. I even learned a thing or two about Blogger, my current application, that I didn't know. There is also a companion blog software comparison chart.
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4 comments:
Thanks for the pointer -- this is an excellent overview article. I was not familiar with Blogware before; it looks like an excellent alternative to the TypePad service.
Blogger rightly gets dinged for its lack of some mainstream features, including categories and trackbacks, but at least in terms of comment spam, it's as good as or better than most. The comparison chart indicates that Blogger does not support NOFOLLOW (which prevents commenters from self-linking to drive up their page rankings) or Captchas (those blurred or wavy passwords used to prevent automated comment spamming). While these features may have been added after the Annenberg article was prepared, they are available.
Blogger Help explains their support for these features (which are in their standard features and not through a plug-in or extension), although their terminology varies somewhat: Captchas can be enabled under the Settings | Comments tab by choosing "yes" for "Show word verification for comments?"; NOFOLLOW does not need to be enabled (and cannot be disabled, I believe) -- it is automatically (Blogger claims "automagically") associated with any link placed in comments.
Some great notes, Colin. Thanks so much! I've had my first couple of spam comments in the past few weeks, so should invoke the captchas feature (word verification for comments). To be honest, I didn't know what this did and now I do.
Cheers,
Connie
The Captcha/word verification function is most likely a very new feature; I found it while wandering around the settings tab the other day, when I also coincidentally read your post and the linked article. The Blogger news (on the dashboard screen) notified users of the change only this morning, as far as I can tell.
I also noticed some other new features being used over at Out of the Jungle http://outofthejungle.blogspot.com .
Every time I think about moving away from Blogger, they come up with the very features I am wanting....but I am still waiting for the ability to categorize my posts!
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