Talking about comic books, TV shows, movies, sports, and the numerous other pastimes that make us Gentlemen of Leisure.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Housekeeping

Just a quick post about Blogger's annoying new approach to comments.

As anyone who has commented on any Blogspot blogs in the last week has likely noticed, Blogger, in all their infinite wisdom, recently rolled out an unannounced change to the comments page of all its blogs, in which the page now has an odd layout and is ugly. More frustratingly, they have removed the ability for readers to subscribe to comments by email, unless the blog uses embedded comments.

Not surprisingly, this makes the back and forth dialogue generated on many blogs, including this one, much more difficult. Anyone wanting to follow/participate in a discussion must now go out of their way to keep track of comments on a particular post, rather than having new comments handily emailed to them. As a blogger, I understand our readers are already giving us their time to read these posts, and even more time to comment on them. Now, Blogger is forcing those readers to spend even more of their time to continue following any discussions sparked by our posts. It is, to put it mildly, horseshit.

For what it's worth, I have expressed my displeasure about this situation to Blogger, and I know several fellow bloggers who have done the same thing. I'm not naive enough to think that will make a difference, but it's all we can do. For now, I'm reluctant to switch to embedded comments on this blog. I'm not a huge fan of that layout either, and I know they cause problems for some people's browsers. In time, though, that may be the way we have to go (and even if we switched to embedded comments here, it wouldn't make it any easier to keep up with comments on any of the other blogs that don't).

Needless to say, if we had the time and money, we'd move off Blogger entirely, something I'd like to see us do at some point in the future. But for now, we're sticking around here, for better or worse.

Sorry for the hassle, and know that it's nothing we have any control over.

4 comments:

  1. A lot of people have complained about that. Maybe it will make a difference. I don't like the embedded boxes either since the page has to reload. With graphic- heavy blogs, that's a problem.

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  2. @Alex: I don't like the embedded boxes either since the page has to reload. With graphic- heavy blogs, that's a problem.

    Yeah, that's one of my concerns as well, especially with my X-Men posts that are fairly graphics-heavy.

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  3. yeah i hate embedded comment posts. They do not work well with others...

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