Publishing Your Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 287

. Consider comment moderation. Blogger ofers a variety of ways to
make sure that the comments on your blog do not get overrun with
comment spam (people or robots coming in and posting fake com-
ments which are actually just attempts to get links back to a Web site).
Be sure that if you have comments on your blog (although you don't
have to provide this option), you turn on comment moderation.
. Post regularly. You don't have to post every day or every hour like
some people seem to. But do post regularly; otherwise, folks might for-
get to come visit. (Sure they could use your RSS feed, but not everyone
wants to do that.) hink of the people who might discover your Web
site via a search engine, only to ind that you haven't posted in a couple
of weeks or longer. Do you think they'll bother to get your RSS feed?
. Publicize your RSS feed. Blogger has Atom feeds available, but
they work in RSS feed readers. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any of
the templates show the feed by default! he feed is always the same
ile name; it's atom.xml. So if you have a BlogSpot blog at example.
blogspot.com, the URL of your feed would be example.blogspot.com/
atom.xml. Make sure you link to that URL on your site's home page,
so that all your readers know where to get your RSS feed.
BlogSpot is a great place for people who aren't very Web-oriented and who
just want to quickly put up a Web site for their research. For people who
want to get under the hood and do a little tweaking, a TypePad blog might
be a better choice.
tip
blogspot and typePad are for all kinds of blogs, while other sites
are designed more for diary sites and online journals, which is a
little outside the research republication we're talking about here.
two examples of that would be liveJournal (livejournal.com) and
xanga (xanga.com).
TypePad
TypePad (typepad.com) is brought to you by the people who do Movable
Type. It is a hosted solution. here are three levels of hosting here: $4.95
a month for Basic, $8.95 a month for Plus (which allows you to have up to
three blogs and customize your design), and $14.95 a month for Pro, which
allows you to have multiple authors (for collaborative blogs), as well as full