OK. I’ve been playing around with the commenting system on this site again. I know that in the past it’s been a bit of a pain, and it’s down to me to publish comments when I finally get around to seeing them.
I’ve used a plugin called CommentChallenge by Jay Allen to force you to answer a trivial question – indeed I give you the answer. In my view this is a little better than the average CAPTCHA systems used which tend involve some hideously deformed graphic that you’re supposed to read. I hope that screen-readers, for example, can cope with this.
For the time being I’ve removed “Preview” as an option because it was giving me problems, and I’ve also removed the need for TypeKey on this blog. Although I liked it for many reasons, I’m no fan of having to register on lots of websites just to comment either. And unfortunately one of the limitations of MovableType is that it seems to insist that only “authenticated” TypeKey users can be “Trusted” and hence publish comments without intervention.
Incidentally, I hadn’t realised how good the SpamLookup plugin for MovableType is. There are always a few comments that get forwarded onto me (in the form of an email telling me there’s an unpublished message), but SpamLookup has been silently dealing with hundreds of spam postings without any intervention from me.
Penultimately, I don’t seem to be able to get “Remember Personal Info” working properly. It’s likely to be a Javascript issue that I need to look into a bit more. So apologies in advance for having to retype your name and email address repeatedly.
And finally, thanks to James for pointing out some issues with my RSS feeds. Hopefully they’re all sorted now, and if you’re reading this in Firefox (you are reading this in Firefox aren’t you), you should automatically have a choice of feeds to subscribe to from the icon in the address bar, should you wish to.
In a few months’ time, this blog will be five years old, so the time’s coming for a complete redesign anyway. Will I attempt to shift from MovableType to WordPress? Who knows. But I will go through a bit of redesign. Time for some fancy new features I say. What I do know is that this website of five years ago still looked better than MySpace looks today. So there.