comments – Dave Briggs

Link roundup

August 1, 2012

I find this stuff so you don’t have to:

Enyo JavaScript Application Framework – "Use the same framework to develop apps for the web and for all major platforms, desktop and mobile."
Features | Re-usable Drupal recipes for government websites – Nice New Zealand government site sharing open source compontents for Drupal for gov webbies
Consultation Principles – guidance | Cabinet Office – "…the Government is improving the way it consults by adopting a more proportionate and targeted approach, so that the type and scale of engagement is proportional to the potential impacts of the proposal."
Inviting comments on a draft bill | Stephen Hale – "With a public commitment to feed the comments that we receive directly into the process of parliamentary scrutiny via the team working on the bill, we’re effectively enabling people to publicly contribute to the drafting of law."
The SEO war – fighting the good fight in search – A rare thing indeed – an interesting and genuinely useful post about search engine optimisation! Who would have thought that such a thing was even possible!?!?!

Comments in the crowd

December 28, 2008

Photo credit: Greenboy

Great post by Steph on comments, community and moderation:

…as more people start to see the web as place for self-expression in their own spaces and other people’s, hearing the interesting voices in the crowd is only going to become more important.

DavePress comments powered by IntenseDebate

December 27, 2008

I’ve just moved the comments on this blog to the IntenseDebate system. It adds quite a bit of functionality to the comments, including threaded discussions (which are part of the new version 2.7 of WP, but I haven’t upgraded just yet…) and the ability to rate comments as useful or not (assuming you are logged into an IntenseDebate account).

If you have an account, it also means that you can keep a track of the comments you make on other blogs that use the IntenseDebate system, which also produces an RSS feed. The other useful thing for blog owners is that while the comments are hosted by IntenseDebate for the purposes of their services, a mirror of them is still held in your WordPress database, so you switch back to a more traditional way of doing comments without losing anything.

I still think there is an opportunity for a more open way of tracking comments around the web – at the moment the solutions are either tied into everyone using the same service – whether IntenseDebate or something like CoComment – or people doing their own thing, like Steph Gray who tags the blog posts he comments on with a certain keyword in Delicious, the feed from which he then republishes in his blog sidebar.

Anyway, I’d appreciate any feedback you have on my use of Intense Debate here on DavePress.

Akismet now has stats!

October 17, 2008

Akismet is a plugin for WordPress (and a few other platforms) which helps combat the problem of comment spam. That when ne’erdowells come on your blog and post nonsense comments in the hope pick click the links in them to buy some viagra, or invest in a Nigerian lottery winning syndicate.

Dealing with this stuff can be a pain.

(I have often wondered how people who run blogs or forums about the uses of bedroom-performance enhancing drugs, or genuine Nigerian investments, manage their spam. How do you decide what is and isn’t?)

Akismet makes it easy by checking your comments against a central database, which records what everyone who uses the system has marked as spam, and then removes it from view. So, no alerts telling you that you need to deal with a new comment – if Akismet thinks it’s spam, you don’t need to know about it.

You can still check the quarantined list for false-positives though, if you want. Sometimes the service works a little too well.

Anyhow, I upgraded the Akismet plugin today here on WordPress, and was surprised to see a new tab on my admin panel for ‘Akismet Stats’:

akismet stats

And once you click it, it makes pretty interesting reading! There are graphs and tables of data. Well worth the upgrade just to see what causes spikes in your comment spam.

Tracking conversations

April 1, 2008

Sounds like Fav.or.it is going to solve the issue of bringing my comments back to my blog, better than Co-comment does (which seems borked at the moment?). From Mike Butcher at Techcrunch UK:

Fav.or.it is tapping into some powerful ideas floating around right now. ReadWriteWeb reckons the conversation has left the blogosphere and leading entrepreneurs like Loic Le Meur want the conversations back on his blog, which he owns, not DIgg/Twitter/ etc. FriendFeed is trying to do this, but it’s basically just another platform owned by someone else, not your blog.

Conversation Tracker will show what posts you have commented upon before and now have replies that you may want to respond to. To date, fav.or.it is still the only service out there that sends comments back to the source of the original content.

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