More on haloscan and comments

I wanted to say something more about the haloscan trackback that I was talking about yesterday. I don’t know that trackback is that big a deal. Simply put, I think it’s just not quite there yet. I can’t, using Blogger and many other tools, automatically ping a post on another blog. I have to go to the Haloscan site, and manually enter a ping for it to show up on their trackback. That’s too much work. Also, if you have a tool, like MT, that does automatically ping trackbacks, and you’re trying to ping a site using haloscan or other trackback methods that either don’t support automatic discovery or don’t work very consistently, it’s not worth the trouble.

Bottom line, it’s a nice idea, being able to see a post and see links to posts on other blogs that reference that post gives your reading alot more depth. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work consistently and easily for all users, so there’s more work to be done on the idea. I’m going to put them up and see what happens. Hopefully even just a handful of trackbacks will make reading things more enjoyable.

Now, if only someone could figure out a way with Blogger to include comments and trackbacks in the RSS feed.

Speaking of which, I might look at using either the haloscan comments, or using the commenting that I use here over at the other site, and turning off MT comments. The anti-spam measures I’ve taken over there have done a good job of keeping spam off the site, but it’s a lot of work. On top of that, the hosting there was donated by a friend of mine, and while I’m nowhere near the bandwidth limits (It’s gets just a fraction of the traffic I get here, and even this one isn’t really close to hitting any bandwidth limits.), I can’t help but wonder if I wouldn’t be doing the shared server a favor by putting an end to the 1000’s of hits to mt-comments.cgi every month. I don’t know how much processing power or bandwidth is taken up running that script over and over again, but there’s no reason for it. I figure disabling the mt-comments and deleting the mt-comments.cgi file will at least make the server respond with a 404 rather than trying to run the script every time. That’s got to help in some small degree, right?

Just trying to do my part and be a good blogosphere citizen. 🙂

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