Tag: ‘vox’ · TangleBones

BoingBoing Bettered

The good people at Boing­Bo­ing have upgrade to Mov­able Type 4.0, and with that upgrade comes the return of com­ments. The new site has an improved look with better read­abil­ity and (to my eye) fewer ads. In addi­tion, they’ve hired Joel from Dethroner and Giz­modo fame to run Boing­Bo­ing Gad­gets, a new sub-​site focus­ing on per­sonal elec­tron­ics. Wel­come improve­ments all around.

But noth­ing that changes ever improves with­out a few mis­takes, not even Boing­Bo­ing. In order to bring back com­ments with­out feel­ing the pain of com­ment spam and inter­minable flame wars, BB has taken two steps. The first, and some­thing I think we all wish we could do, is to hire Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light to manage their com­ments. Great move. The second step was to require com­menters to choose between being anony­mous (cow­ards) or cre­at­ing an account at BB. That’s right, one more account with a user­name and pass­word to forget.

What’s sad is that there are at least two better options. The worse of the two is to set up Type­Key authen­ti­ca­tion. Yes, it’s another user­name and pass­word, but at least it’s usable across mul­ti­ple sites. I have a Type­Key account just to be able to com­ment at the Dooce.

The best solu­tion, which Mov­able Type 4 sup­ports, is OpenID. This open authen­ti­ca­tion system allows users to authen­ti­cate through a number of dif­fer­ent meth­ods (for instance, by having a free Live­Jour­nal or Vox account), and MT’s sup­port is very flexible.

So please BB, please open up a little. Don’t make me get a spe­cial account just to com­ment on your pages (okay, I already did, but still).

Thursday thoughts

I’m not too thrilled with blog-​based self-​horn-​tooting, but I just wanted to share that I got some recog­ni­tion at work today. Woot! I’m ecsta­tic: it’s nice to know that the work I do is appre­ci­ated. Plus there was some more direct com­pen­sa­tion as well. Yay!
To cel­e­brate (well not really) I’ll give an invite to Vox (a com­mu­nity blog­ging site like a pretty, well-​integrated live­jour­nal) to the first person that asks for it in the com­ments. Make sure to leave your email address in the form so that I can send you the invite.