Blogging Sueblimely

Interested in discovering the impact of the upcoming festive season on the blogging world, I jumped on my sleigh and did a quick circumvent of the blogging world to find that the Christmas spirit is indeed coming alive. Blogs are decking their themes with Christmas images and posts, new ones are popping up dedicated to the event and Christmas memes abound.

My search was delayed a while when I became engrossed in the preparations going on at the North Pole on Santa Claus Blog

Imaginif is running a competition with an important theme Christmas Competition: Child Safety Tips. Prize money equals AU$1 for each entry in the Child Safety Tip competition. Entry is by way of leaving your safety tip in a comment to the post.

ChristmasMaps.com is running a series of contests between now and Christmas: So far they are:

• “ChristmasMaps.com loves Bloggers” runs until December 15th. Entering the contest involves commenting on their Santa’s Blog.
• ChristmasMaps.com Winner Take All – The blogger who can convince the most number of people to visit their site wins a gift card from an online retailer.

Details of the contests and prizes, including more ways to qualify for entry, can be found on the contest page.

Please let me know if there are other blogs with Christmas content of interest.

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Have you noticed that Blogger has changed its comment form so that you have to either sign in with a gmail address or as anonymous? If the blog owner does not allow anonymous comments you cannot comment at all; unless you have a gmail address. A link to a gmail address not attached to a Blogger account leads to a ‘Profile Not Found’ page with the message “The Blogger Profile you requested cannot be displayed. Many Blogger users have not yet elected to publicly share their Profile“. This mistakenly assumes that all those who comment are bloggers themselves!

More significantly for bloggers:

Unless you use blogspot Blogger, your blog url is not linked to. This is in addition to the fact that blogspot default linking is set to nofollow; which means that links were not counted for pagerank purposes anyway. Google is penalizing bloggers once again, after so recently downgrading pagerank for those using paid for links. I am really peeved that my freedom in using the internet is being eroded once again and do not like to be controlled in this way.

This move goes against the basic nature of blogging, that of bloggers linking to each other in the spirit of give and take and community building. How can you build up a relationship with another blogger if you do not know where to find them. This move is bound to reduce the amount of commenting on Blogger blogs. Therefore ALL bloggers are being disadvantaged – both blogspot and non blogspot users.

What can we bloggers do about this? I have some suggestions:

• Non blogspot bloggers can leave their blog url in the nickname field of the Blogger comments form. The usual nickname could be used to sign off the comment itself. I prefer this solution to leaving the url in the body of the comment as, under normal circumstances, this is considered spammy.
• Blogspot bloggers can change their comment form message, suggesting that non blogspot users leave their url as their nickname or in the body of the message. To do this go into the Settings/Comments area of your dashboard. Add your message to the ‘Comments Form Message’ section. Example:

• Use Haloscan , which replaces the blogspot comment system. Haloscan allows external linking as well as having a trackback feature which is missing from Blogger. This is not an ideal solution as older comments are not retained by Haloscan but it is better than nothing.
• All bloggers, whether Blogger users or not, contact blogspot using their suggestion form and ask them to allow users to leave their blog url in the comments form once again.
• If like me you have left blogspot for another blogging platform, sign up for another gmail account in case you want to leave messages on blogs that do not allow anonymous comments. This will prevent your email address leaving a link back to your old bloggger blog.
• Blogspot users could move to another blogging platform. WordPress.com for example allows you to import all your posts and comments from blogspot. Either that or consider using your own domain. There are many other reasons to move away from blogspot. You can see my own reasons here Reasons I moved from blogspot Blogger.
• Set up a Blogger blog with one post which links to your non blogger blog. I am sure spammers will be doing this – is Google encouraging spam?? If you have a blogspot address that you do not want to link to, sign up for a new gmail account and new blogspot address to match. Consider using an email address such as yourwebname.dotcom@gmail.com to further publicize your blog name. You can divert any mail to this account to your email address of choice in gmail Settings/Forwarding and POP/IMAP/Forward a copy of incoming mail to .. This will save you having to login to this gmail account to retrieve your mail.
• Post about this issue yourself to register your disapproval.

If anyone is now considering a move to WordPress and need more help and information than I have given so far in this blog, please leave a comment or contact me via my comment form. I will either write posts myself or point you in the right direction to find clear instructions.

Google’s power is starting to concern me and I am going to find alternatives to their services, even though this may not be so convenient. Do you think I am overreacting here or justified in my concern?

If anyone can think of any other solutions to this recent violation of our rights as bloggers, please let me know.

Update:

Blogger users could use the Intense Debate comment system to replace Blogger’s. I have seen this in place on a couple of blogs and the option is still there to enter a blog url when leaving a comment.

Related Posts:

• Using your own Blog URL as your OpenID
• What is an OpenID

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While I was writing a recent post it occurred to me that although the content was not specific to other bloggers, references in it made it appear that it was. I am now going to try to be much more aware that not all my blog readers are bloggers themselves, although, because of my subject area, the majority are.

We often acknowledge and thank other bloggers by creating links to their blogs, adding them to blogrolls, subscribing to their community pages…. You can give your non-blogging readers some recognition from time to time too.. You could for example include something in a post about a comment they have made, thanking them for feedback, ideas, suggestions etc. If they are a member of such sites as Flickr or YouTube you could link there, as they may be trying to develop friends and a community in this way. If they run ordinary websites you could link to those.

Although we may not get reciprocal linking or social networking kudos from non-bloggers they are as important a part of our personal blogging communities as our blogging mates. Such recognition may even encourage non-bloggers to return to your site and to leave comments!

With this in mind I would like to thank the following people for their support in my blogging efforts:

• David my parter who is always supportive in whatever I do, (and despite what I do at times too). His business site, not yet complete is at DC PC Solutions – I promise to finish the web site very soon, David.
• My daughter who’s intelligence, determination and intrepid nature is just about to see her head off to work in various, often remote, places around Australia. If you are looking at weather reports for Western Australia the information may well have come from her. Please don’t blame her if she is wrong though Her fascination with sunsets and clouds set her off on the path of being a Meteorologist from the age of about 12. She does not have a public blog but you can see her puppy at Introducing Amos. He is a few months older now and has been living here for a few weeks. Despite him eating my furniture, insisting on sleeping across my chest, licking me continually and chasing the cat, I will miss him when he goes on Friday.
• My elder son who puts up with the time I spend blogging and does not complain, although I know he would like to! As a Software Engineering/Commerce Uni student his knowledge comes in handy. His honesty and down to earth opinions help me see my blogging and web building more objectively. He has been YouTubing some of our visiting dog’s antics. The cat gets her revenge- Amos and Pearl as do our curtains – Revenge of the Drapes
• My younger son who is so impressed by my awards – because of suffering from Fragile X Syndrome he cannot read my posts, but as with all things in life he has a positive cheerful attitude and does not let this phase him. I have learned a lot from him on how to have a positive attitude to life.
• Keef whose sense of humor and travel experiences, as an international coach driver, would make fascinating blog reading but I have not yet convinced him to give it a go. I will give a plug here to a website I created but was Keef’s idea. An organization that he is an active member of, as a coastwatch volunteer and committee member. Ingoldmells Point National Coastwatch . This site was created with a Content Management System called Joomla which I am planning on writing about soon.
• To those who have left comments on my site with just a name and no indication of whether you blog or not. I thank you.

If any of you reading this are not bloggers yourselves please remember that leaving comments on blogs are welcomed. We bloggers enjoy getting feedback and like to build a community of readers..

Oh I feel a meme coming on! On second thoughts I am going to wait until my blog is active on my own domain

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