Successful Blog

CoComment Echoes

by

coComment logo

I used to stand on the hill outside of the house where I grew up, shouting to hear the echo come back . . . now that coComment has arrived, I don’t have to drive 100 miles when I feel the need to hear my echo anymore.

I had my first coComment experience the other night when NZAlan left a comment and took it with him too. That was the night we moved servers for Successful-Blog, and unfortunately about 10 comments were lost. Alan returned the next day and asked about the lost comments. I told him the story. He was able to take his comments from the night before and put them back. WAY COOL!

What Is coComment About?

Duncan Rileyat the Blog Herald has written an indepth review on his test of coComment in Beta Version. Duncan starts by admitting he was a disbeliever. He’s tired of all of the hype around Web 2.0 applications. Can’t say as I blame him. Most are way over done, clumsy, or don’t even work. But once Duncan worked with it, he ended up putting coComment on his personal blog.

What changed his mind? He gave these reasons.

      The concept
      The simplicity
      The lack of bad stuff

I let him fill you in on the details himself. He’s the one who has actually worked with the app and he explains the features and benefits quite well.

What’s the Verdict?

Here’s snip of what Duncan says:

If I was scoring it, maybe 9.5 out of 10. I’ll hold the .5 back because the service still has a few bugs (it is in beta after all), but kudos where its due, I’m likely to be using this service fairly regularly.

Read the review. It answered every question I had. Then click this image link to visit the site.

There’s a box on the front page of the coComment site where you can request an invitation to test coComment for yourself.

–ME “Lizâ€? Strauss

Editing Comments in Blogger–What a Concept!

by

If you use Blogger, which is after Word Press, the most used blogging platform, you might want to get to know Greasemonkey and Improbulus of a consuming experience logo. They know the ins and outs of Blogger and today I’m bringing you their solution to editing comments, rather than just deleting them. I know–what a concept!

1. Before you begin, you’ll need to get greasemonkey from mozdev.org.

Grease Monkey Upload

2. grease monkey is an extension for Firefox. If you’re not feeling lucky, Improbulus at Consuming Experience has a detailed article explaining how to install it.

3. Upload the greasemonkey script for editing comments.

GreaseMonkey User script for editing comments

4. Improbulus will show you how to use it.
consuming experience logo.
Edit comments in blogger article screen shot

It’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds, because Improbulus is clear and direct in giving detailed directions on how to do each part. So, if you’re a Blogger Blogger, give it a shot. You’ll be the only Blogger Blogger on the block who can fix your typos when you make a mistake in the comment box.

greasemonkey has a wealth of tools to help Blogger function with more up-to-date features, so once you get started, I think you’ll be sailing through the whole script catalogue. Other greasemonkey scripts include how to make a larger post editor, how to make a larger template editor, how to add a tag editor, how to keep current time, and how to blog by mobile phone among others.

Blogger Blogger what are you waiting for?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Daily Kos Tech Update

by

This Just In:

For all the techies . . . the Daily Kos says

Quick update on some furious development going on behind the scenes.

The comment boards have been completely rewritten and are absolutely amazing (using Ajax, for those who know and care about those sorts of things). They will be, without a doubt, the most technologically advanced anywhere. Now, while the code is complete, the hackers are working to integrate it into Scoop. This will be tricky and should take another week or two. Hopefully on the lower end of that estimate. But man, these new comments will blow your minds.

Here’s the link:

daily kos logo

No More NoFollow

by

I asked Sumeet Jain if I could republish this post of his here, because though I had heard of the issue, I didn’t fully understand it. He was more than happy to agree. I thought it best to include all parts of his article including comments. I encourage you to check out the links along the way for more information and an additional tutorial should you decide remove nofollow yourself. –ME “Liz” Strauss

no more nofollow
by Sumeet Jain

Monday, December 19th

If you’re a blog owner, please pay attention. Early this year, Google announced the nofollow value for the rel attribute. This made it possible for blog owners to stop Google from crediting sites comments link to. This was mostly received positively and most blogging platforms picked it up. WordPress, the most popular blogging platform, includes nofollow by default. The logic behind the move is to shut out comment spammers by not rewarding them. Whether or not that’s an effective way to shut them out is not what I care to discuss. I dislike nofollow because it’s antithetical to the web.

So I’ve removed it from my installation of WordPress, and I encourage you to do the same.

Removing nofollow yourself:

Open wp-includes/comment-functions.php.

Find “function get_comment_author_link”
Replace “return = “$author”
with “return = “$author“.
Save and close.

Removing nofollow via plugin:
I haven’t tested any of these, but they’re available nonetheless.

DoFollow

Follow URL

For an detailed explanation of why nofollow is bad, check out NoNoFollow.

COMMENTS

a little birdie named Jem told me,
There’s more to getting rid of nofollow that editing wp-includes/comment-functions.php – I wrote a tutorial on it AGES ago. 🙂 You can find it here: nofollow removal tutorial

i thought about it and responded,
Hi Jem, thanks for the link to the tutorial – nofollow certainly has been around long enough that many tutorials were written. I wanted to wait a bit and see what kind of reception it got and impact it had on the community. It’s sad that the way it was used was simply to stick it in all the comments – like a blanket solution to a very intricate problem.

It might have been nicer if platforms like WordPress were strategic in their use of nofollow. For example, if a blog has moderation enabled, then all comments can at least be shown initially but have nofollow included. I can definitely see a couple uses for it, but it really is unfortunate that the only prolific use of nofollow was to kill linking.

As a side note to others reading this, Jem’s tutorial will remove nofollow for links within the comment as well. For example, the link to her tutorial in her comment above would not have the nofollow value. Some of you may like to maintain that value while others may not.

a little birdie named Jem told me,
“like a blanket solution to a very intricate problemâ€? – I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I don’t have anything against those who choose to use nofollow, although I don’t believe in it myself.. my major problem with it when I used WordPress was that it was forced upon people. Why not have it as an optional feature? Of course, it’s not a problem for me since I coded my own weblog, heh.

i thought about it and responded,
I do have something against those who choose to use nofollow. It’s likely my own ignorance, because I can’t think of why they would use it.

a little birdie named Tauquil told me,
I’m all with you on this one.

i thought about it and responded,
Glad to have your support, Tauquil. I noticed that your blog is one of the few that does follow links. Props to you.

You’ll find this post and the follow-up post here:

This article: no more nofollow

The follow-up post: nofollow advocacy

–Sumeet and Liz

Related articles:
How to Code Accessible Links–Part 1
Blogger/ Firefox–Editing Trap
Blog Construction–What’s Your Function?
Use Bloglines OPML to Find Interesting Blogs

SOB Buttons and Directory Update

by

The SOB Directory and other pages are under construction. New Pictures. New Presentations. I thought it best to keep the Directory undercover until I got more of your bios in. So start sending them . . . . hint, hint, grin. 🙂

The SOB Button Still Exists

If you are an official SOB and need a new one. Here you go.

SOB Button

By the way, please feel free to adjust the size to fit your blog design. We want SOBs to have Successful and Outstanding Blog Designs too.

If you’re anxious to become an SOB, just link a post to share it with your readers. Write about it to add value to the conversation, and email me at lizsun2@gmail.com with a link to your post.
That’s all there is to it.

More New Features Are Coming

So hang in there. The fun is just starting. Some really strong articles are coming too.
We’re becoming a Magazine AND a Community for Outstanding and Successful Bloggers

–ME “Liz” Strauss