Thursday, May 31, 2007

Enhancing The Blog Experience

I've made a few changes on how this blog works, and how I interface with other blogs:

• I have enabled comment moderation. The reason for this is because I get a lot of hits to previous posts through searches and I think I'm missing comments. This is a way to make sure I get to see all the comments...it is not a way for me to really moderate anything.

• My buddy Allogenes helped me understand the Google Reader. This has become quite a handy tool. If you have a Google account, you can set up the Reader function to monitor all of the blogs you regularly visit. It shows you when there is new content which does a great job of reducing the number of times you have to visit sites that haven't had any activity. It has a nice preview type screen. The only downside I've noticed is that comments don't appear in the window so you have to go to the actual site to read them. I'm on a Mac so I open the Reader and park it down in my dock and it will show when/how many new posts have occurred since the last time you read them. I know it appears kinda freaky in a stat counter since I now read posts almost as soon as they are uploaded...I'm really more of a lurker, not a stalker!
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Safari will monitor your favorite blogs for you. I've setup a folder in my toolbar at the top called "RSS". Click on the blue "RSS" button next to the address of your favorite blog and then bookmark the resulting page into the new RSS folder you created. Now, whenever you open Safari you'll see something like RSS(12), indicating the number of unread entries since the last time you looked. I love that feature in both Safari and the similar feature in IE 7. I hear Google Reader is good, but I don't like the idea of Google tracking everything I read and do.

Big Daddy said...

You can use Bloglines, too.