Apologies to those attempting to Comment from Blogger January 9, 2007
Posted by caveblogem in Blogs and Blogging, Other.trackback
According to Writers Blog anyone with a Blogger account trying to comment on the posts below is experiencing difficulties. I just tried to get into my blogger blog and found that it was out of commission, something about maintenance. And there are a couple of blogspot bloggers who have tried, in vain, to comment today. Let’s hope they are fixing the problem.
It’s a bummer, because six of the last seven days this blog has achieved record numbers of page views. The sky’s the limit, unless people coming over from Blogger are inconvenienced enough never to return.
Pretty Good on Paper 
Just in case I wasn’t clear, the problem is for anyone trying to comment on Blogger. Their system seems to be functioning properly again, but it’s still running a bit sluggishly. Your wordpress.com blog is running just fine. And I appreciate the shout-out.
Whoops, sorry Jim. I misunderstood. I had heard specifically about somebody with a Blogger account that couldn’t comment on this blog.
Yeah, there’s no overlap between the two blogging sites, so problems with one shouldn’t have any reason to cause problems on the other. :)
Jim,
These technical problems are a bit mysterious to me, I’m afraid. Why do the sites have so much trouble seeing each other? Is it like the Macintosh/IBM thing? Or is it two companies trying to set a standard in different ways? Or is that the same question phrased somewhat differently?
Honestly, I couldn’t tell you why someone with a Blogger account wouldn’t be able to comment here. In theory, anyone with Internet access should be able to comment on a wordpress.com blog, provided they fill out the required information in the comment form, whereas I know that a lot of Blogger folks allow only other registered Blogger folks to comment (after they’ve logged in) in order to defend against comment spam. In your individual’s case, my money would be on a problem with their browser not processing either wordpress.com’s comment form or your choice of template properly, thus blocking their attempts to leave a comment.
I’m not sure I understand your question about the two sites “seeing” each other, since the two don’t really interact with each other in any way. Logging into Blogger does not allow anyone to comment on a wordpress.com site – they’re two completely different entities. Besides, no one has to log in to comment on a wordpress.com site (unless the site owner specifically configures they’re setting to only allow registered users to comment).
I don’t know if any of that makes sense. :)
Apparently I have an answer, of sorts. All of the comments were languishing in the spam filter. I don’t understand why, of course. Sometimes I get legitimate comments filtered there, whether they have links in them or not. I don’t recall this ever happening when someone with a wordpress blog tries to comment. Sometimes I get comment notifications from people with blogspot addresses in my bulk mail. I don’t understand why that is either.
My comments about the hosts “seeing” each other had more to do with the fact that WordPress’s listings of “Top Blogs,” for example, only lists wordpress blogs. And when tag surfing you only see WP blogs, etc. I was being a jerk, probably. I do think that people who are logged into a blogger account are treated differently from people who are logged in to their WordPress account. I can’t prove it. But then, I can’t really prove anything.
Yeah, the spam filters occasionally nab false positives, which is why it’s good to periodically check your spam folder and “free” up those legitimate comments. I rarely ever get any, but some folks get quite a few of those. All you have to do is approve them, and then Akismet remembers those for next time and your readers who got filtered the first time stand a better chance of NOT getting filtered next time.
As for the reason why wordpress.com only lists other wordpress.com blogs – it’s like any other blogging community like Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. They can only keep track of the ones on their own servers. Trying to keep track of every other blog on the Internet would be an almost insurmountable task. That’s what we have blog search engines (i.e. Technorati, Google Blog Search, etc.) are for. :) Does that help make things a little more clear about how the communities work?
Thanks, Jim. I’m still learning this stuff. Well, I’m sometimes learning it.
Maybe someday we will all be part of the same blogging community, living in peace and harmony with our nieces and nephews at Myspace and Facebook, our estranged cousins at Livejournal, and our brothers and sisters at Blogger.
Honestly, that’s part of what trackback/pingback capability is supposed to do – tie the blogging community a little closer together. It’s just that not everyone uses or allows trackbacks or has the functionality for it.
I still haven’t figured out what that stuff is. I have asked technorati to “ping” my account, but I imagine it has broader uses. Trackbacks I don’t understand at all, I’m afraid.
Technically, you ping Technorati. Pinging is something your blog does when you post a new entry to led certain search engines and aggregators know you’ve updated your blog. So when you hit ‘Publish’, whatever sites you’ve got set to ping will be notified that you’ve updated, and they, in turn, will come back and look at your blog and update their information accordingly.
Most people don’t understand trackbacks and thus don’t use them. Basically, a trackback is when you write an entry on your blog that links to an entry on another blog. A trackback is basically an automatic comment that your blog leaves on the other blog (the one you linked to) notifying the owner of that blog that you wrote something that was relevant to one of their entries. WordPress has the option to do trackbacks automatically (if you enable it) – it will look for a trackback link on the site you linked to, and if it finds one, it will leave a comment there with a excerpt from your entry and a link back to your site. If you Google ‘trackback’, I’m sure you’ll find more information on the subject. I actually trackback my own entries all the time because frequently one entry will lead to another, so it’s kind of like leaving a little breadcrumb trail between entries. I love ’em; I just wish more blog engines used them.