LiveCommentPreview – Helping to Facilitate the Conversations in Weblogs

Tags: Metablogging, Enrique Dans, Blogger, WordPress, Libertad Digital, Plugins, LiveCommentPreview, Ease of Use, Open Source, DeLurking, Blogstudio

Continuing further with some of the recent changes that I have put together over here in elsua, here I go again with another metaweblog post to give you some details, and some further food for thought, on one particular addition that I have put together not long ago and that, till recently, I really didn’t think about it that much, until I finally saw it in one of the weblogs that I get to read on a regular basis: El Blog de Enrique Dans, one of the most influential weblogs out there, written in Spanish. No doubt.

Yes, that is right, but before I go into it, let me just give you a little background of where I am coming from. I have been reading Enrique’s weblog for quite some time now, even from way before, when he was still using Blogger as his main weblogging engine. Time and time again I was having a number of different issues with it, specially while reading it through my RSS feeds by creating double entries, read marks turning unread again for no apparent reason, etc. etc. So when he decided he was ready to make the move away from Blogger and into WordPress, I thought it would be a really interesting experience to see how things would improve from there onwards. On both sides, for himself as the weblog writer and for me as one of his many readers.

Oh, yes!!!, and how that experience has changed the way I enjoy his weblog articles nowadays! From what I can tell, things have changed as well for him, from the perspective where it looks like he has just  opened himself to a whole brave new world with WordPress. At least, that is what you would be able to read from his recent contribution to Libertad Digital (Article written in Spanish, by the way) and which he mentioned as well over at his own weblog. It looks like he has enjoyed quite a bit the particular move to this weblogging engine that most of us have learned to appreciate and praise.

Yes, his experience, detailing how he has managed with the move from one weblogging platform to another, has been quite revealing, to say the least. Check out the much more detailed account provided by the folks who helped him with the transition. The guys over at Blogestudio. So much so that while reading through it all I just couldn’t agree more with how lucky I was at the very beginning of my weblogging attempts for being exposed to WordPress and decided to stick around with it. I don’t think I would have been weblogging till now if it weren’t for such a platform. As simple as that. The level of detail, the ease of use, the huge amount of incredible developers putting together some of the most impressive plugins under an Open Source license, the level of support, the amazing response time to security issues with the platform and so forth (Did I mentioned that it is free as well? ;-)) are just perks that we always seem to take for granted but perhaps we shouldn’t.

Take, for example, the latest plugin addition to this particular weblog of mine: LiveCommentPreview. How something so simple, and relatively easy to install, as providing a user interface towards typing your own comments in real time to a particular weblog post can be yet so powerful. Yes, indeed, LiveCommentPreview may be a really simplistic plugin, but it is actually that particular capability what perhaps attracted Enrique to put it up together in his weblog in the first place. And like him, myself, too!

For a number of weeks, I have actually been thinking about how unfriendly it is actually to leave comments over here, in this particular weblog. I know that quite a few folks out there do have a preview option, and some others really handy WYSIWYG text editors, but I was actually looking for something a whole lot easier to install and use. And with LiveCommentPreview I found it. So I installed it and you would be able to see it now up and running for every single weblog post. That way you get a chance to check what you type before you submit it in real time. Quite handy, if you ask me! I wish many other weblogs out there would have the same capability.

Either way, what it started as watching how an influential weblogger detailed his experiences moving from one weblogging platform to another, which happens to be the same one I am using, has given me the chance to put together some further improvements for the user experience of this particular weblog. So next time you share a comment over here, yes, I realise that National Delurking Week is now over, I hope that user experience is a whole lot easier. If not, give me a shout. If yes, all I can say is …

WordPress rocks!