Having a mooch, as I do, through my emails in the middle of the night – head nodding as I try not to crush a feeding baby – I made my way over to JM’s blog. The mini series ‘Blogs – How Do You Follow Them‘ has been incredibly interesting to read and I wish I had more time to read through the comments. Head on over there if you’re interested on a quick study on how people follow blogs, do their reading and their criteria for choosing who to follow.
Anyway, it was after reading these posts that I got to thinking. There are lots of bloggers that I used to speak to quite regularly, picking their posts out of my email and following the links through to read what they had to say. But some of them haven’t popped up recently. I assumed that they were just busy and hadn’t posted. After all, life happens to all of us, doesn’t it? Some days there is just no way to get a post out on time, whatever you do – which is why most of mine are planned out in advance, sometimes by as much as two weeks.
I logged onto the WordPress dashboard, thinking this was a bit odd, and followed the links through to my Reader. Well imagine my surprise; there are LOADS of posts there! Most of which haven’t made it anywhere near my email. Grr!
Crap. So when I thought I was caught up, it turns out that there are a tonnes of posts that I just haven’t seen because I never though that they wouldn’t come to my email. As a matter of fact, there are 43 blogs that WordPress thought to set as ‘Never’ when asked if new posts should come to my email!
Wuh? I never told it to do that!
*huff huff* I’ve fixed it now, and I know in future to double check it. Its fascinating though, that’s 43 blogs I’d forgotten I follow because its been so long since I heard from them!
This post is as much to apologise for suddenly going quiet on all those blogs, as to let you guys know; WordPress does weird things with your settings! If you think you should be getting more emails, or if a blog you follow has gone strangely quiet, just check out your Reader. You may get a surprise.
WHY CAN’T I COMMENT ON BLOGGER BLOGS?!?!
For reasons that I can’t understand, any Blogger account will allow me to enter my comment, log in with my openID (in this case, WordPress) and hit the ‘post comment’ button. But rather than posting the comment or even holding it for moderation, the site then rejects the comment and throws it back out at me. If there is a CAPTCHA phrase, the site point blank refuses to accept what I type, no matter if its correct or wildly incorrect. I’ve sat on one site and tried thirteen times (I counted) and still couldn’t leave a comment.
I only mention this because there are several Blogger-blogs in the last three weeks that I have been desperate to leave a comment for and I’ve not been able to. Which is horribly frustrating.
Is anyone else having this problem? Is there a solution? Is there something in the setting of these blogs which prevents non-google folk from posting?
If you have a Blogger account, I urge you to check your settings. Having a look at the Q&A on Google, it appears that to enable comments from outside Blogger you have to arrange your settings like this:
Failing to do so will cut you off from lots of people who want to communicate with you but aren’t allowed because they cannot authenticate themselves.
Of course if you don’t mind anonymous comments then by all means pick the first option, however, in the case of most folks, I’ll bet you want to know the comment is from a real person, right? So pick the second one.
Please, please spread the word! I can’t possibly be the only person experiencing this problem and its to be benefit of all if we can let folks know there’s something wrong. Incidentally I can’t find a way to put a problem to Google myself without opening an account with Blogger, which I’ve no intention of doing (at least just yet). Two blogs is more than enough for me to handle right now!
Help me out people!
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