The good news is, Facebook has changed it’s mind about that stupid “beacon” thing that I ranted about last week, where they broadcast your online purchases in your Facebook news feed. You now have to opt IN to the service, which is totally the way it should be, instead of making users go to the trouble of opting out. Bravo Facebook, I guess I won’t be quitting just yet…
The bad news is, Blogger sucks! Did you notice that as of late last week, you can no longer leave your non-blogger.com URL in any comment you leave on blogspot blogs? If you don’t have a Blogger account, you can only leave your “nickname” with no link back to your blog. How lame is that? I find all sorts of great new blogs by surfing the blogs of people who comment on other blogs. I looked for documentation about this all through Blogger’s site and couldn’t find any reference to why they would do this.
There are workarounds, of course. You can open a Google account and display your URL prominently in the Blogger profile, or just add your blog name as an href tag in the comment itself. Since they haven’t promoted this as some sort of new spam-reduction service, I can only imagine that they’re doing this to prop up the registration for Google accounts. Makes me even more happy with my decision to dump my Blogger blog. My Gmail account may be next, at this rate.
Shame on Google!
Shame on them… surfing other comments is how I found your great blog!
Thanks for the heads-up on Blogger. That is so lame! I have two google accounts and run most stuff off my realname one but I comment on blogs with my anonymous one and logging in and out to comment is a pain in the rear end.
I noticed that ‘nickname’ thing when commenting last week and wondered what it was for. How nefarious.
Agh.. i’m really sad to hear that they took away that feature. 🙁 Please still feel free to leave your url in a comment. 🙁 Darn!
I too wondered what that nickname thing was for. How lame.
Google’s change bites. But cool for Facebook. Thank goodness I read your blog or I’d be totally oblivious. (I’m just somewhat oblivious now.)
OK, this comment has nothing whatsoever to do with this post but I was just watching The National and, blam, there was your blog. It was only a one second screen shot but there it was. The news stories was about finding alternate toys to those made in China this holiday season. The mentioned how the mom-o-sphere is all abuzz about the lead paint problems. Anyway, I wasn’t sure if you knew so I thought I’d tell you.
The Blogger thing caught me by surprise.
For what it’s worth, you can embed HTML in the nickname
Dani will appear hyperlinked in some views, but not others.
Besides, you used to use Haloscan for comments anyway!
Erk, that was supposed to appear as
Dani
Erk, that was supposed to appear as
< a href=”http://danigirl.ca/blog”>Dani< /a >
Hmm… Perhaps it’s a goof? Or maybe if enough people complain they’ll change policy?
Here’s hoping…
Update: Blogger blogs will now let you authenticate with AOL/AIM, LiveJournal, TypeKey, WordPress or any OpenID!