I’m having fun tweaking my blog in Blogger Beta, but then I wondered if they have the same features offered over at other blogging services. Two things I wanted were keeping track of comments being posted on my blog and also of any posts that link back to mine. Lucky for me, all of the options related to comments and back links are in one page.
First up: comments. You can limit who can make comments on your blog. There are three comments settings: allowing anyone, which means they can write their comments anonymously, limiting it to those who have accounts on Blogger or Google, and limiting it to those you’ve added to the authors’ list. How’s that for keeping your blog within your circle? Also, Blogger Beta allows you to moderate comments. This is great if your posts and opinions might generate a lot of spirited discussion, or if you want to catch any spam comments before they show up. There’s an option if you want Blogger to send you a notification of any comment that don’t meet your settings. You can moderate en masse by going to the moderate comments tab under posting. As an added bonus against spam, you can have your commenters go through a word verification step before their replies are posted. That way you can avoid software generated spam which can’t go past this step.
Want to keep track of the posts that link back to your own? Now you can add a back link feature that can be integrated into your posts. Simply go to the page elements tab in templates and edit the space devoted to your posts. The configure blog post pop-up window gives you the option list down the posts linking back to your entry. Now you’ll know if anyone found your posts entertaining to write about. There’s a few more things about the new Blogger Beta that I’m still exploring, but it’s so fun and easy to do that I don’t mind it at all.
[tags]blogger beta, comments, back links, trackback[/tags]
Originally posted on October 24, 2006 @ 1:09 pm
