So, did anyone notice that I turned on the full feed for RSS and e-mail subscriptions? Now you see the entire article in your e-mail or RSS reader.

I’d love to hear feedback about this change because I honestly don’t know if you guys wanted that or not. I’ve been told by some people that they don’t want to get long articles in their e-mail. But I’ve had other people request a full feed.

So, now that I did it I’d like to know what you think about it so I can decide if I should leave it on, or go back to just an excerpt. Here are a couple of my own observations:

• In Outlook, my e-mail update doesn’t download the pictures or videos in the post. They just look like broken links or something. That is kind of annoying.
• In Google Reader, the entire post is visible including videos and images.

That’s all I know at the moment, so please get back to me on this one.

Ok. Tonight I made some major changes to the way comments are handled on the blog.

• Added a few ‘quicktags’ to the comment box for text formatting.
• Added a live preview directly below the comment box.
• Added threaded commenting. This allows people to respond directly to a previous comment and keeps responses grouped for ease of reading them.
• Added paged commenting. This way when there are lots of comments on a page they are broken up into 10 comments per page. You can see the older posts by choosing the previous comments pages, or you can still opt to display them all at once.
• Comments are in reverse order now, meaning most recent comment is first. Again, this should speed things up by allowing people to skip all the old comments and get right to the new ones.
• The comment box is now resizeable if you have JavaScript enabled. This way you can make it larger if you have a particularly long post.

I’m hoping for some feedback on these changes, so please let me know what you think. Feel free to use this post as a testing ground to see how all the changes work.

John

Wow, did you realize that there are now over 70,000,000 blogs on the Web according to Technorati? And interestingly enough they rank One Man’s Blog among the top 6,000 blogs on the net!

I just wanted to take a moment to thank everyone for linking to articles on my site because that is what Technorati tracks, and I appreciate every single link you provide! So Thank You! (and keep em coming…)

While we’re measuring things, two other interesting measurements have been improving steadily over time as well.
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I’m very sorry to those of you affected by this, but this evening I made a mistake and accidentally erased a few comments.

My anti-spam plugin had caught a few “good” messages, and I was talking on the phone when I was trying to “de-spam” them. Well, I must have accidentally hit the delete button while I was distracted and lost the messages. There were at least 3, and to make matters worse I know that two of them were very long comments and I was sincerely looking forward to reading them. (One of them was on The Rules of Islamic Wife Beating.)

Again, I apologize and I hope you don’t take it personally or think I was censoring anything on purpose. If you noticed that a comment you posted is not showing up this is why. I would encourage you to try again, although I understand if you decide not to.

John

Some of you may have noticed that earlier today I added a feature in the sidebar that displays the top commenters. There are two little catches to this new feature:

1. You must be registered and logged in when commenting to turn your name into a link to your Web site.
2. You must enter your Web site address in your user profile in order for the link to work.

There is one very special thing about this new feature. The outbound links are normal ones which convey full search engine benefits. People often pay a couple hundred dollars a month to get a link to their site from a site as highly ranked as this one, so I guess you could say that it literally pays to be active here!
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