We all love a good discussion, right?

Okay, maybe not that type of discussion where one person is yelling at you the whole time. But we all love sharing our opinions.

I’m going to integrate the new Question of the Day feature that I introduced yesterday to kick off to­day’s blog post.

Question of the Day

This question is a recurring question that comes from a variety of different people that used to read my original blog, titled Five Minutes in My Head, hosted on Blogger. The question is, “Now that you switched to the second version of Five Minutes in My Head and no longer use Blogger or WordPress, why is it that we can no longer comment on your blog posts?”

First of all, my readers were able to comment on my blog posts back when I used Blogger and WordPress because the software that ran the actual blog came with a commenting feature. Thus, I didn’t have to program anything on my own, and could simply accept, publish, and reject comments through a user in­terface.

After I moved my blog to my own website and started using my own PHP code to run it, I didn’t really want to write a commenting script. I was going to at first, but ended up getting lazy; also, I decided that my blog would be cleaner and neater without commenting.

Eventually, I thought a good amount about letting others comment on my blog posts, and concluded that it’s too self-centered to prevent others from contributing to my work. I decided that with the release of the third version of Five Minutes in My Head, I would re-enable commenting.

But then, when I came down to programming the comment script, I had second thoughts again. Back when I used WordPress, I had massive amounts of spam comments. Fortunately, WordPress came with an automatic spam filtering plug-in, but unfortunately, I won’t be able to implement it into my website.

To satisfy both my desire to allow commenting and my undesire to receive spam, I decided to make it a bit more difficult to comment on my blog posts. Effectively automatically filtering out comment sub­missions to only those who truly want to comment, I decided to allow comments only via direct e-mail.

In order to comment on a blog post, a person must send me an e-mail. In the body of the e-mail, he or she must include the date of the blog post and the comment he or she wishes to submit. If any of this information is missing, the comment will not be published.

Please note that even if all components of the e-mail are included, if the comment itself is not something that would incite a discussion, or is not intelligently written, it may be rejected regardless. Also, keep in mind that all spelling and grammar errors are subject to correction before publication.

That’s all for today, come back tomorrow to read about another new feature coming to Parkzer’s Blog.

Discussion

To participate in the discussion, send me an e-mail with the date of this blog post and your comment.