Regrettably, Winds of Change.NET has been forced to reinstate the ban on blogspot.com URLs for comments and trackbacks. The amount of spam coming from that domain remains excessive, and Google seems unable to get a handle on the problem.
The bottom line is that if you host there, you live in a bad neighbourhood - and others will seek to protect themselves. If you're serious about blogging, there is no substitute for your own domain.
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.
Just a tip.
Domains Made Easy
Register a domain for as little as $7.85 a year with an optional privacy option.
Been a good service for me for over 3 years.
Great tip, Davebo. Thanks.
While we're on the subject of setting up your own domains, I'd like to offer a couple tips for those afraid of moving away from Blogger:
1) Farm out everything. If you are tempted to run your blog on a computer that sits in your house (or office) don't do it. It's not worth the hassle.
2) Domain registration is different than hosting. Domain registration gets you a name on the internet. Hosting gets you a computer somewhere on the internet you can put your stuff on. You can buy both at the same spot, or buy them separately.
3) Domain registration is cheap. Davebo says around 8 bucks. I'm paying $15 a year and I'm happy. Don't pay more than that.
4) There are a LOT of places that will host a blog for you. If I wanted to start over, I'd just email Joe or somebody else with a popular blog and ask them how they put it together.
5) Don't worry about all the features for the hosting account (bandwidth and all of that). You won't need most of that stuff anyway (who needs 50 mailboxes for a blog account?)
Hope that helps. I do a lot of programming with blogs. If you need any help, just email or drop by my blog.
Daniel, I'd like to second your "Farm out everything" advice.
Even as an IT professional, it's just too much hassle and to cheap not to let someone else deal with it.
Right up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia".
I have been using MT 3.2 since I moved Kesher Talk from Blogger last spring.
Finetuning the spam filter is easy. I have had maybe 1 spam item / wk which should have been nonspam (and I can post it manually anyway, as long as I check the junk file to see what's been caught). I have had no spam items show up on posts which should have been spam. i.e. the filter is excellent.
All my comment and trackback spam gets filtered into a junk area. I can then delete or promote to publish anything there. I can also set them to automatically delete after x days.
There is no reason not to upgrade to MT 3.2.
I hear Wordpress is good but I don't know anything about it. But since WoC is already on MT, going to 3.2 is a no-brainer. Also, lots of fun plugins are available!
Most hosting services will also register domain names for you as part of a hosting package or for under $15. So get the hosting service first and save yourself extra work.
I recommend Living Dot. I think some other services have slightly better bandwidth rates but LD knows MT and blogs and their tech support is very responsive, and they are not expensive.
Davebo:
I got into high-level technology management consulting over time, but I keep my fingers in the "bits and bytes" stuff just for fun (I have about a dozen computers working at my house) What I found was that I ended up being a network administrator during all my free time! Instead of mowing the grass on the weekend, the whole family was mad that the email server wasn't working, or that the DNS system wasn't forwarding correctly.
It just isn't worth the hassle. I know the temptation is to buy some blogging program and run it on that old box in the corner, but don't do it!
Running a blog on your own box is like voting the Dems in for president. Sure, it may feel like you're trying something new and taking charge, but at the end of the day it's just the same hassle you had before, only more of it. Everything is more broken than it used to be, and you get the blame for it. For some things, it's better to let the professionals handle it. (grin)
Daniel
I agree with you 100%, but I find it incredibly unlikely that not running a webserver at home will result in a 50% increase in the US debt ceiling in just 5 years nor falling into the biggest foreign policy blunder in over 30 years!
;o)
Oops, did I say 50% increase in debt ceiling in just five years? If only it were true!
Scratch that, 100% increase.
Davebo.
You should see my electric bill! Talk about a unsustainable debt increase! These power company guys are robbing me blind. I gotta switch to AMD.
So the question of AMDs is still open, in my opinion.
Daniel,
You remind me of my father in law. Worked in the Army nuke program in the 50's and by 85 had pc's all over the place at his house that, as far as I could tell, did nothing but suck juice.
I've got both a wintel and a linux web server in my home office and I think I booted up the Linux box about 4 months ago for a few hours.
It's the noise that drives me batty.
OK, back on topic, and btw, it really was only a 50% increase!
First note - you can stay with Blogger and have your own domain. Winds did for a while, until we moved to MT. The only thing required is some simple FTP settings in Blogger that send it to the right folder in your web hosting account.
So it can be pretty painless.
Daniel, you're just lucky the cops haven't fingered you yet for a "home grow" op. Gotta watch that power consumption.
Finally, suffice to say that MT 3.2 comes with some issues (which we've communicated to SixApart), and we're hoping enough of them are resolved in MT 3.3 to justify an upgrade from MT 3.1.
"First note - you can stay with Blogger and have your own domain."
Yes the old Kesher Talk was on Blogger with its own domain.
I'm curious what the issues with 3.2 are, because I'm having a good time, except for php on MT wants to change my permalink ever time I make changes on a post.
I'm on MT 3.17 and like it okay fine. Even though I'm not a linux guy I figured the MT community was large enough that it made the most sense. So I found a hosting provider that does MT.
But I haven't as much customization with it as WOC. In fact, I've purposely tried NOT to fiddle around with it. There's a lot I would like to do, but I'm not really in the blogging business like you guys -- I just blog informally.
Having said that, I've been working with some CSS that might look nice on the blog. The problem is for people like me, once you start you end up 20 hours later just putting it back together. There's nothing wrong with that in a commercial environment, but the effort-reward isn't worth it for a hobby.
The cops are welcome to come visit any time they like. I'm lucky to get the garden growing, much less anything else. I just did another count, and we have seven computers that are on all the time, 4 at the house and 3 at the office across the street (I ran fiber under the street to the office). The other five are sitting around in various places. I guess it is the hi-tech equivalent of a house with a lot of rusted cars in the yard, eh?
The thing about blogging is, from a technical standpoint, it's not all that big a deal. The computer loops through the database and spits data into the template. It's something a junior programmer could set up in a couple of days. MT says they've got all sorts of new and magical stuff coming up. It will be interesting to see what it is.
When working on my program, batBack (shameless plug: Free blog toolkit! Installs in seconds and works on all major blog engines!) I visit a lot of blogs from a lot of providers. Sometimes the providers make it impossible for people to "go off the menu" but most times the entire blogging concept is not that difficult when compared with something like JavaScript or XML. To me, the whole domain/hosting concept is the trickiest thing to teach folks.
But that includes Iraq the Model! It's not Omar and Mohammed's fault they live in Iraq.
"Dear Sir: You may be right. Sincerely, Mark Twain"
I used to feel a similar way about AOL -- still do, modulo a few people I like. You're allowed to feel that way about Blogspot. Me, I guess I'm not serious yet. {shrug} ;? We all do what we think we gotta. Me, I have domains but can't deal with the hosting issue at the moment. So it goes.
Alex,
One can get still one's blog hosted and a domain set up if one wishes - even from Iraq. It isn't as easy, I grant.
Nor is it wasy to accept a deluge of spam scams that pollutes the site, or devote overly-large parts of our days to keeping Winds clean. OR, for that matter, to discontinue comments and trackbacks on our blog.
Spammers are thieving scum who create collateral damage. This is one example.
Yes, sir, already getting ready to jump ship, as soon as I've archived all those literary masterpieces... ;)
As a guy whose coding knowledge runs to a solid understanding of Beagle Bros. screensavers (you know who you are!), the embarrassment of riches option-wise is one of the big "whoa, gotta look this over" moments.