Just spent some time getting caught up on a few blogs... People, unless you've had a noticeable problem with spamming, please remove the need for photographers to type in security codes off of your blogs!!!!

Make it as easy as possible for people to post comments - you'll be glad you did!

Ok... Rant of the week done...

Done. Good tip.



Okay, I'm gonna hold you to that.

Word to that.

It's pretty darn annoying to have to jump through hoops to add a comment like "Great pictures!" or "Wow!"

The Wordpress Akismet plugin is good enough, IMO.

Agreed Nathan! After making 60 to 100 comments this week and having to confirm 45 to 80 of them..I know of what you speak. I love askimet. That's what I use.

Dang!!! 60-100... Matt, that is impressive.

Ok, I guess I better get on this comment thing. I have this thing getting in the way called a Job. Can someone find me a good doctor? I think it is very serious disease.

Okay so...
I put the askimet widget on my new blog, I don't know what it is , but I love comments and want to keep getting them!
Candy

I'm all for getting rid of security codes, they're a total pain but, how do I do it? Not too savy with html/code and what not. What does Akismet do? I'm on Blogger by the way...

+1 - Askimet = the hotness

First things first: get off blogger and get wordpress!

what's wrong with blogger

So what exactly do you mean by security code?

I just set up my very first photolog (blog) about 4 days ago,

http://shawnreeder.com/photolog

and for the first 3 days it had this feature where in order to leave a comment you had to register.

I didn't like that so I finally figured out how disable it, but it stlll asks for a name and email in order to leave a comment.

Is this standard, or is the security code you're speaking of?

I set mine up with wordpress on my own site, and I must say I love how much you can customize wordpress. Thats what I was looking for in a blog, and wordpress has been great that way,


Shawn

What's NOT wrong with blogger?!

Blog snob

For a free blog, nothing's wrong with blogger!

Just go to your settings under the "comments" section and disable comment moderation and word verification!

Thanks Nathan, I forgot I had aready done this a while back.
So at the risk of opening a can of worms... any specifics as to why blogger's not as good a wordpress? Or is this another endless debate like mac/pc and canon/nikon...

don't think it works on blogger, but on my wordpress it flags posts for moderation more than 1 link in them. usually spammers are pasting urls

Lots of info about what's wrong with blogger here:
http://www.opensourcephoto.net/forum/index...&hl=blogger

what's SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, me thinks!
Candy

yepper - how high you come up in search ranks.

if I post about osp, I'll show up top 10 for that term. if I write about clients, and they google themselves,. I come up #1. if I post about the Carousel Mall here in Syracuse ... yep... lol

OK, so I've tried to find a good way to switch to Wordpress, and I've come up empty. I really don't have many issues with Blogger (been with them for 4 years or so). A little while ago I tried to "convert" to Wordpress, but there wasn't a good way (without re-entering everything -- yes, everything) to do so. Maybe I'll look again to see if anything has changed.

http://wiki.wordpress.org/BloggerImport may help

Yeah, doesn't work. Unless you downgrade to an older version of Wordpress (which isn't a big deal to upgrade afterwards) but the show-stopper is that it must be from the "old" version of Blogger. I upgraded to the "new" version of Blogger, but then couldn't use any of the enhancements. I couldn't figure out why I still had to use the "template" rather than whatever it is now. I finally saw that if it's hosted on your own site, you have to use the "template" -- fantastic. Half the sugar, none of the caffeine. Or something like that.

But really, I haven't had too many issues with Blogger. SEO works great.