Monday, June 27, 2011

Input needed

You may have noticed that I haven't posted in a while. There's good reason for that -- I've been pondering the future of this blog. Not whether or not I will continue to post; that's not changing. Rather, I've been contemplating whether or not to switch from Blogger to Wordpress.

Why switch? Comments.

I used and was very happy with Haloscan during the early years of this blog. Then those rotten bastards at JS-Kit bought out Haloscan and implemented the gawdawful abortion that is Echo in its place. I hate Echo with a hatred that burns white hot 24x7.

I put up with it because (a) this isn't exactly a comments-heavy site to begin with, and (b) I was too lazy to look into what I needed to do to replace it.

But when my beloved, Deadeye, told me that she was unable to enter comments the other day due to Echo, that was the last straw. Nobody disses Deadeye. Nobody.

So I began exploring a replacement for Echo in earnest. Blogger native comments was never an option; been there, done that, hated it. After exploring the interwebs, I installed Disqus on this site because it is very highly recommended.

But that creates a dilemma. Echo makes it impossible to export comments w/o prior experience with their API. They really are assholes, in every sense of the word.

Okay, so I lose 3 years of comments - so what? There's nothing been said in those comments that amounts to a hill of beans. But there was an argument not so long ago around the topic of deletion of comments from those bigots at FLDS Texas. They claimed I delete comments from trolls just like they do. The problem for them is: I don't. To this point I've deleted only one comment on this site, and that was to protect the commenter from themselves (overt racism with your real name attached to it = not smart). Ultimately, I decided that I don't give a tinkers damn what those subhumans think. Lost comments? So what.

Then I was taken with another idea. Why not cut the cord to Blogger entirely. So I started playing around with Wordpress. I really like the layout I built, the color scheme, etc. It bothers me that it's not customizable to the extent I would like, but I can live with that, I suppose.

So here's the deal: This is your chance to weigh in. Stay with Blogger and the status quo, or move over to this? Click here to vote. As in Chicago, you can vote as many times as you like.

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