Carl discovers the world

This is one of those things that really annoys me about some blogspot users, (and for that matter, people who use Typepad), please, please, for heaven's sake allow people who aren't blogspot users to make a comment on your blog.

This is particularly annoying when these people have signed up for Entrecard, they obviously want traffic, I assume they want people to revisit, perhaps even become fans who subscribe to their feed, and they do allow comments, but they're idiots! They only allow fellow blogspot users to make comments. Why? This makes no sense.

Now listen, I have a blogspot account, in fact several to showcase the themes I've done, but this is my main blog, this is where I want you to visit, and if I leave a comment on your blog I don't want you or any other potential visitors going to my blogspot profile page first. I have this blog for a reason, so people can read what I have to say and so I can build my own group of online friends.

Not allowing me to comment on your blogspot blog unless I login into blogger just annoys me and probably thousands of other people who might like to comment on your posts. Remember, if you've written something good enough or interesting enough that I want to comment, this is a good thing. It means more readers for you, and if you monetise your blog as so many of you do, then you should want people like me to comment.

So, please do me and everyone else a favor, enable comments. It's really easy to do, here's how;

In this video tutorial I show Serendipity users how to install the HTML Nugget plugin and then use it to add a network badge to their blog sidebar. The same technique can be used to place Adsense advertising into a sidebar, or a counter.

This video complements the video I prepared a few days ago on plugin management and is aimed at new users.

I'm still looking for ideas for other s9y screencasts so please add your comment below to give me ideas.

This is my first video tutorial for Serendipity and it's all about plugins, specifically how to move sidebar plugins from one column to another, changing the order of s9y sidebar plugins, adding plugins to sidebars, installing Spartacus, and installing plugins using Spartacus.

Plugin management with Serendipity is so much easier than some other Blog software and this 10 minute video shows how powerful it is. Many new bloggers automatically choose Wordpress or Blogspot simply because a friend uses it, or because 'everyone' uses one of the other packages. I'm a passionate supporter of Serendipity for my blog and if you're one of those people who hasn't used it, and want to try it out, sign up for a free Serendipity blog over at Supersized.

With the recent update of the original free HTML template that Hawaii is based on I thought I'd add the extra colorsets to my Blogger Template list.

Two versions of this template have been produced, the original content-sidebar-sidebar layout, and the sidebar-content-sidebar layout that a few Bloggers seem to prefer. The images have been uploaded to ImageShack so most Bloggers will only need to download the template files, but if you do need to host the images yourself, the zipfile for Hawaii has been updated to include all four versions of this great template and all the images.

As an interesting aside, the Elvis Presley film Blue Hawaii from 1961 which also stars Joan Blackman is one of my all time favorite films. I know it's a bit old now but it's good fun with a great soundtrack.