My Prairie Gazette

If you live in Winnipeg - your read the WFP. Wherever I lived I always favoured the local media, it’s a fast way to learn a lot about the place, about its people, especially if you are relatively new to that place.

The WFP also has an online edition. This is not new. Neither is the fact that, as in the case of many other newspapers, you can access only a limited number of articles for a limited time. From a blogger’s point of view this isn’t great because if you link to an article in your “favourite” newspaper, it might work for a few days but after that (in your blog post archives) all you’ll get is a 404 (not found). I guess we have to live with this.

WFP also discovered the blogosphere a few months ago, and it has a Blog Central page for journalists’ blogs.
They use the same WordPress script as this site - although apparently a mutilated version. For some unknown reason they seem to miss the importance of the interactive nature of blogging.

As many bloggers can witness, you discover interesting blogs by reading posts and comments on other people’s blog sites and, if a comment makes you interested in that person’s ideas, you simply click on his/her name: usually this is a link to the commenter’s own blog (website). This is a great tool of connecting the blogosphere and to discover blogs that otherwise would remain unknown to you. Let me add a technical note: if you are afraid that people would comment on your blog just to get “search engine juice”, i.e. to boost their page rank by having links from respectable websites - stop worrying. By default, WordPress adds a “no-follow” attribute to any outgoing link in the comments area, so search engines will not spider those links. In plain English: it does not help the commenter to get links from WFP.
Knowing this, I find it difficult to understand why the URI/URL field in the commenters profile has been eliminated on the WFP blogs. I’d like to hear any rational explanation for this.
(In case you are wondering: yes, I would like to have a link to my blog if I comment on your site: maybe some of your readers will be wanting to come and read more on my own blog. If you are not aware of this - you missed to understand the whole blogging phenomenon!)

Another hassle is the requirement for registering in order to be able to comment. I agree, it might be a personal taste issue that I hate registering just to post a sentence or two. Even without registering, the blog owner can have my name (OK, whatever nick name I choose) and my email. So, why the need for registration? Spam protection? - Get serious! Registering doesn’t protect any blog from spammers, since 99% of the spam is trackback spam that easily goes around your registering requirement.
Now, I have registered just out of curiousity on one of the blogs at the address above. I can log in and the comment fields are displayed - with the missing URI field. However, if I switch to another blog, it says again that I am not logged in. Confusingly enough, I can log in again with the very same user/password combo on any blog… but if I’d like to post comments on ten blogs, I’ll have to login ten times - using the same credentials. So much about user-friendliness.

P.S. Maybe they don’t know one of the WP Support Forum mods lives in Winnipeg :)