Monday
Sep102007
A Note On Comments
Monday, September 10, 2007 at 9:17AM 
This blog has been up for four days and already Aksimet has imprisoned over 5,000 spam comments!
I hope that will explain why I don't post all your comments immediately. The first time you post a comment it's held for approval, but once you have one comment approved future comments will go up immediately. It's actually a pretty cool system. One more reason to love Wordpress. Incidentally you do not have to register to comment - in fact, I'm not even sure what the point of registration is. I'd turn it off if I could figure out how.
Some people have asked me if I'll still post on Pownce and Jaiku. I'm not really sure. I think I'll probably put some things up there - TWiT alerts and so on - but my plan is to put most everything else here. I will definitely use this instead of my old Vox and Tumblr blogs. It's kinda cool to see all the old posts here going back to 2001, and I think I'd like to keep that kind of record going. (There are currently 949 posts and 19,548 comments, contained within 35 categories.)
I have been able to import all the Vox posts thanks to Blogbackuponline.com. (Cool service by the way.) It crawls all the old posts and spits them back up as RSS, which Wordpress can import. All the original videos and pictures are still hosted on Vox, though, and I can't get them back. There are also some formatting issues which you'll notice whenever there's an embedded video from Vox. But it's better than nothing. I can only get the last 20 Tumbléo posts - but that's fine, they're just ephemera anyway, not personal posts. Someday when I have some time I'd like to go back through all the old posts and clean them up - tag them and so on. Unfortunately all the really old comments are now anonymous (and you'll have to read the Vox comments on Vox) but at least they've been preserved.
Which raises an interesting question. If I embed links to photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc - in other words if I don't host the media here - what happens in a few years when those other services disappear? I was thinking, for example, of occasional video posts which I'd host on videoegg.com since I can't afford the bandwidth myself. But those posts won't have the longevity of plain old text posts. I guess I should stick to prose? It makes me think there will be a lot of audio and video blogs which will won't be available in 20 or 30 years.
Reader Comments (46)
Options=>General
Scroll down to the "Memebership" section and remove the check mark next to "Anyone can register". Click "Update Options" and you're good to go.
Hope it helps.
~ Teli
[...] ahead, subscribe to our feed!BlogBackupOnline: I found out about this service while reading through Leo Laporte’s latest post in which he talks about how he used BlogBackupOnline to import all old VOX posts from his old blog [...]
Welcome.
lol, I should have said "Welcome to wordpress". That only makes sense.
To turn off registration, it's under the Admin Panel: Options->General tab (it's that first page that shows up in Options); somewhere down the page it says Membership and "Anyone can register" -- just uncheck that.
This removes that "Register" link from your login pages. This way 1) people can't register (which you noted is sort of useless for just commenting) and 2) you don't get register spam (which I used to get in droves).
Welcome to WordPress, Leo! I'm a big fan - you keep technology fun!
Leo, if you go into your wordpress dashboard and look under Presentation > Widgets there'll be a widget you can remove from your sidebar called Meta. Removing that will make the sidebar login you wanted to turn off go away entirely. I had the same problem with my wordpress site and just decided to play with the widgets to see what they did.
[...] Leo Laporte uses it, but what is BlogBackupOnline.com about? Doh. BlogBackupOnline provides an effortless way to backup, restore, and export your blog. That’s it. Simple as Pie. Note that you only have 50mb to store your backups which should be plenty for most bloggers. 1) Sign up 2) Register the blog you want to back up 3) Your blogs are automatically backed up daily. [...]
Leo, I'm glad blogbackuponline worked for you, but I've been testing it and have found several problems and would not recommend it to anyone for now. I thought I was going to write a blog post saying how great it was (I'd reviewed other blog backups) but when I got into testing, it acted wonky enough that I couldn't. I am getting ready to write a post on my findings, check http://clear.bluedei.com for more information if you are interested.
Susan Mellott
[...] per chiunque abbia un blog: si tratta di BlogBacuckpOnline. Complice l’esperienza positiva di Leo Laporte, che ha trasferito il suo blog da Vox a Wordpress senza colpo ferire o quasi come riporta anche [...]
"If I embed links to photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc - in other words if I don’t host the media here - what happens in a few years when those other services disappear?"
It's funny, I'm going in exactly the opposite direction. I'm trying to have my stuff in "hosted" services as much as possible.
But as you say, the trick is to choose services that are popular enough that they won't just "disappear" without warning or export. I doubt Flickr would "close down" without giving users the possibility to export their data. Or wordpress.com. Etc.
[...] I found out about this service while reading through Leo Laporte’s latest post in which he talks about how he used BlogBackupOnline to import all old VOX posts from his old blog [...]
Welcome to wordpress Leo
Hey Leo, good to see u onboard. This platform seems to get better and better.
Great Job Leo!
Glad you on on the WP boat! :)
Hi Leo. Thanks for all your great instruction--you and all the other screensavers. If you like Akismet, you should try Bad Behavior--we use both together.
i meant, we use both Bad Behavior and Akismet on our blog/website--together they save me hours of spam-cleaning every week.
Welcome to the Wordpress community Leo! :)
Nice looking site.
Just a note regarding the ol' Vox posts, if they're online they're easily retrievable using some wget magic.
At least the photos, let me know if you need help vacuuming them over!
[...] he’s also dropped SixApart’s Vox for Wordpress for his blogging platform of choice, although that happened almost two months [...]
Thankiossi
It's great
[...] March 6, 2008 in Uncategorized Well, I’ve moved from Vox to here, but unfortunately WordPress.com won’t import my Vox blog. Hopefully when I move all of this to my own domain and my own host with my own WordPress installed I can do that, as it seems Leo Laporte was able to. [...]