On Comments.

OK, I'm not sure what to do about comments right now. I confess that I'm not totally happy with the way Blogger's new commenting system works. The biggest bugaboo is obviously that "Anonymous" thing, which requires every one who wishes to comment to either (a) sign into their Blogger profile or (b) sign anonymously, with no link to homepage. I was rather hoping that Blogger's commenting system would mirror Movable Type's, but instead they apparently chose to mirror LiveJournal's. I've noted in the past that I find LiveJournal's comments a bit cumbersome to use (or outright impossible, if the journal owner hasn't enabled anonymous comments), so I'm not too thrilled to see Blogger go that route. My view is that commenting on a blog should be an easy thing to do, with as little "hoop-jumping" as possible. I'm not wild about the fact that when I comment on a LiveJournal, I have to manually sign my comment so that the journal owner knows who I am. So I can't give Blogger's new system a total thumbs-up yet. (It could be worse: to leave a comment on AOL Journals, you have to have an AOL screen name. No ifs, ands, or buts.)

However, I do really like the fact that the comments appear with the body of the post, and not in an extra window; and I also really like the fact that with Blogger's system I wouldn't be in the position of relying on an externally-running script for comments. When YACCS was running slow, the load time here would suffer; and when YACCS was down entirely, the load time here was interminable. That, to me, is a pretty big deal. I'm on a 56K dial-up connection, and the not-infrequent glacial pace of a blog that's mostly text always annoyed me. (It was a prime reason why I dumped BlogRolling, for example.) Also, YACCS archives comments once they're more than three months old; I assume that with Blogger's system, comments on a post are always active. (But thus far there seems to be no way to "retrofit" older posts from before the update to include Blogger comments. That would be a nice thing to do, guys.)

So: I found YACCS slightly easier to use, there are other things I like about the new Blogger system. Therefore, I am currently leaning slightly toward keeping the Blogger system in place, but it's not a very strong lean. I'll leave the Blogger system up for a period of time -- probably a week or two -- and gauge how things are going. We'll see.