Comment Moderation

FYI: due to inability to delete spam comments, I have changed settings to moderate comments before being posted publicly.

Typepad hinders Typing!!

I usually love to rant about features in blogger making life difficult for users, but this post is different. Today I compared a feature on blogger with a similar one on typepad and guess which one sucked!

In this age of spam bots find different ways to put link spam in any place they can find, one commonly used technique to avoid them is the captcha technology. With this technology, a user trying to fill and submit a form is asked to fill in another field in the form with characters displayed in the corresponding image. The server generates a new image every time the page is loaded and most of the spam bots are incapable of deciphering the images. So as most of the spam bots cannot read the image, they can't fill in the verification and hence the post cannot be submitted. It is a pretty simple technique and has achieved a lot of success.

However, the technology has its flaws or should I say unintended captchas. Today I set out to log a comment on a typedpad blog post. It was a simple two line response which should have taken just a minute or so. However, I ended up trying to get the response submitted for about 10minutes! Their word verification captcha asked me to fill in the characters from the image. But the person who wrote the code for their captcha implementation probably didn't know how much to obscure the characters and has several random lines on it making it really hard to read even by a human let alone a bot! It took me 6 tries to get the verification done.

Not only they have made the verification task so confusing, but they don't give the user any other choice e.g. an audio clip! Wait, the audio clip should be there regardless as a visitor could be visually impaired and might not be able to decipher even an unobscured image. Blogger is much better in this respect as their image is clean (although the characters can be a bit jagged) and they also offer audio help (hasn't worked on Linux for me though). For TypePad it is a serious accessibility problem and is a big show stopper for me at least. So from now on, typepad comments are probably not going to happen let alone getting an account on typepad!

Update: June contacted Typepad and they told her that they are working on it. I hope they get it sorted out soon.

Blogger Login

Blogger, oh blogger. Please give us a better login page so that users don't have to to click twice just to bring the cursor to the username field. And it is worse for those like me who try to keep the use of the mouse to a bare minimum. To be able to get to the username field, I have to invoke the Find function of the browser to find the "New Blogger" link and then use the Tab button 3 times to get to the username field. If you want any ideas on how to make a login page, please check out Yahoo! Mail or even your own Google Mail where the caret lands in the username field automatically after the page loads!!

PlanetPlanet & Blogger

I just noticed something and I can't find out where the fault is. Is planetplanet doing something wrong? Or does the new blogger have a bug?

This installation of planetplanet says that a feed(blogger) has a new post if there is comment. For example if there was a blog posted on 8th Jan, and someone commented on it today, planetplanet reads the feeds (every hour) and shows the post made on the 8th as today's post! Imagine someone comments on a 6month old post! That does mess up things a bit and the planetplanet readers do raise an eyebrow.

I have a feeling that it is blogger which is playing tricks. In the new blogger comment feeds are also available, but it shouldn't really send a new time for the main feed. I think I will ask around on the planetplanet mailing list as to who is the culprit.

Update: It has to do with planetplanet because I just noticed that the same thing happens with typepad.com feeds too. Looks like blogger only.

Changing the Template

They said that the new blogger has new and better features, so I tried to play with the template as well. This is the template I chose to play with the new blogger template features. It is called Mr. Moto and was done by Monsieur Zeldman. I have seen and read quite a bit of his work and he is awesome.

I have just played with blogger's GUI system for setting up the template and page elements. The only change I made by hand was decreasing the size of date and increasing the size of post title. Before I start doing more digging in the template manually, I want to say that blogger's template system is pretty impressive. One can even move elements by a simple drag and drop. If you haven't tried it, do try and I'm sure you will be happy that you did.

One thing I missed is selective font size/family settings. The present font settings apply to the whole page. It would be wonderful to have per-element font settings.

PS: I wonder how it works on other browsers e.g. Safari and Opera.

Testing 1...2....3

Testing the move to new blogger beta .

Update: I need to redo the template to make use of features from the new version of blogger.