For the month of July, I’ll be trying out a some different things with this blog.
First, trackback is returning to this blog, at least for all new and recent posts. I’m doing this because trackbacks can now moderated by me, so I don’t have to be quite so worried about trackback spam. It was because of a very bad outbreak of trackback spam that I turned off this feature last year.
The downside to this is that this means that comments will also be moderated. Ideally on this blog, I would just moderate trackback and leave comments alone. There is a legitimate concern that slow moderation could impede the flow of conversation in comments, and I have really appreciated some of the conversations which have happened this year. So I’ll try to be quick with approving comments, but there will be impediments caused by time zone differences if nothing else.
I’ll be evaluating these changes in a month. So if it turns out I don’t get any trackbacks and my comments drop down, I’ll probably dump this change.
The other change is that I’ll be trying out some advertising – the feature which I mentioned here with some skepticism. I’ve since looked into it some more, and feel sufficiently reassured to at least give this a test on a temporary basis. Those of you who read this solely by the rss feed won’t be affected at all. For people who do look at the actual blog, you will have an important say in whether ads stay or go. If enough of you hate the idea of blogs with advertising and never click on one of the ad links, the ads will most likely go. I won’t keep them unless they’re worth my while. On the other hand, some of you might choose to click on an ad link once in a while, kind of like a tip jar.
I may also think about changing the look of this blog, now that I have a few more options at my disposal. By the way, the larger fonts on my sidebars aren't my changes, probably a bug associated with the changes to TypePad which have just happened.
At the beginning of August, to coincide with the third anniversary of this blog, I’ll decide what will be staying for the next year.
