...as David Bowie would say, producing great music and providing comfort to stammerers everywhere.
Regular readers may have noticed that I regularly tinker with and adjust this blog in an effort for continuous improvement. The latest changes involve a big change to the comments system that should hopefully provide greater interactivity and more ways for you to get involved.
The new comments system, supplied by JS-Kit, allows you to add images, hypertext and even YouTube video with a couple of clicks. Avatars will make it easier to identify people and multiple log-in options mean you can access additional features (such as tweeting your comment) easily.
This new system will also mean faster moderation - hopefully almost immediate - instead of waiting hours for me to log in and check whether everyone behaved themselves. Too much spam always made it past my spam traps in the old system, necessitating such strict moderation, but the initial signs are that this system may not suffer the same problem. This means people can see their comments appear almost instantly and interact far quicker than before. The excessive moderation always hampered discussion on the blog, so I hope this encourages greater interaction - especially as you can now reply specifically to a particular comment.
There is now a 'rating' system as well, allowing readers to rate each post from one to five stars. You don't need to leave a comment to rate a post, you can just click on the stars. By rating posts, it will allow the blog to easily sort the most popular and best entries and serve them up in the future to new visitors.
But don't fret - if you don't have a log in and prefer the old simple way of leaving a comment, you still can. Merely select "Leave comment as: Guest" and you can enter the nickname, email and url (both optional) just as before.
The previous commenting system has been switched off for now. All those comments are archived in the old format beneath the new system, so everything is still available to read on those older posts.
Of course, with anything new I expect teething problems. There will obviously need to be some fine-tuning and adjustment as I skin and experiment with the new system. Importantly, if anyone has a problem with the new system, or sees their comments disappear or any other weird behaviour, please let me know via the contact form.
