Melissa Maygrove

Like many authors thrust into the world of social media by the marketing and networking demands of the craft, I'm still learning the technology side of maintaining a blog. I decided to mention a few tricks I've discovered and invite others to share their tips, too. Making our blogs user friendly is important, and Google's Blogger gives us several tools to do that. Since I've addressed Captcha and other comment restrictions before, I'll just link that page and move on. (For those who don't know, the only comments I restrict on this blog are anonymous ones.) Besides making it easy for visitors to comment, we also need to make it easy for them to interact with our posts. By that, I mean we should take care to make embedded links both visible and easy to use. Let's start with visibility...

I thought I'd take a little detour from discussing the craft per se and talk about random stuff — my life, social media, my writing goals and the like. Skim the icons and read what interests you. It's the middle of July. My son, the one with autism, has a half-day class for the next few weeks designed to work on his social skills and prepare him for middle school. His twin will be transferring to middle school, too, but from a home school setting. (Yup. I'm one of those weird homeschool moms.) In about six weeks, all three kids will be in public school, at the same time, for the first time in four years — my oldest a freshman in high school! I will miss them, but I will have some peaceful days to write. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

This is a short post about word verification a.k.a. 'Captcha' on Blogger (Google) blogs. The purpose of word verification is to prevent automated spam. You may not even realize you have it, because it doesn't require you to do it when making comments on your own blog. But it will discourage visitors from posting comments, so you should seriously consider turning it off. If word verification is on, your visitors will see something like this when they post  a comment: After typing their comment, they must decipher and enter the wavy words shown and get them exactly right, caps and all before their comment will be posted. When someone is visiting several sites or posting multiple comments, this gets very old very fast. From what I've been told, Blogger controls spam fairly well, so this really isn't needed. As an added layer of protection, I restrict anonymous posts to my site. So far, I've not had any problems with spam or inappropriate comments. (5-30...