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MBL Widgets and why you have to comment to show your face around here

January 31, 2008 |

I mentioned before that I am not a fan of the MyBlogLog reader community widget. As you can see, although my community continues to grow, I still haven’t taken a shining to using the widget. The reason for this is simple, people don’t actually have to read your blog to get their profile linked. I’ve even auto-joined communities just by passing over the same link more than once without even being aware of it. This means that my picture, and therefore my profile and therefore my website, has been linked on websites I’ve never so much as skimmed. Is that fair? No, not really. But if the website’s owner wants to give it away like that, who am I to stop him?

I am still a fan and avid user of MyBlogLog and chose to implement the community on my website in a different manner. MyAvatars is a plugin that displays the commenter’s Gravatar or their MBL avatar next to their comment. I found this was more of an everybody wins approach to using display pictures because they still get their profile linked and I, in return, get a comment.

After all, wasn’t that the original intention of having a blog as opposed to just a collection of articles? Getting comments? Many of us choose to reward our commenters with a top commentators list (much like the one I have). Well would it make sense if all somebody had to do was load my page to get onto the top comments list? Ofcoarse it wouldn’t. So, to me, it just makes good sense for someone to have to comment in order to get their picture on this website.

Tagged : Wordpress, design, Whats New, blogging

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