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Greetings avid readers! In the last two days, there have been a couple of you that have posted a question directly to this blog. Now I love it when people post comments and ask questions—that’s one of the best things about blogs.

But I had an incorrect setting in my blog parameters that allowed anyone to register and then post an individual blog entry. The problem with allowing this is that I lose all control over what the search engines see when they crawl the blog.

I am not the type of person that lives for search engnie rankings, but they are an important aspect of making this blog the best it can be for the readers. After all, the better the SE rankings, the more people find the blog and contribute to it. That makes for a better thing for everyone. So I do need to retain as much control as possible. There’s also the little issue of those idiot spammers out there. This blog already gets hit with dozens of spam comments a week. Fortunately, some guys a lot smarter than I’ll ever be wrote an anti-spam “plug in” for WordPress (the blog software I’m running this on) that automatically kills the vast majority of spam comments. But it won’t work on direct entries, as it assumes I either write them or approve them…

I’m currently pondering the best way to implement user generated questions that aren’t related to a blog entry. One way is to utilize the seperate Real Estate FAQ, which is designed to accept user generated questions. I’m working on the best way to integrate that here, but for now, the link is in the Real Estate Links section of this blog. (in the right column)

I’ve reset the software switch that let people post new blog entries. Any registered user can submit an entry, it just come to me for approval instead of being posted here immediately. Commenting ability remains unchanged and can be posted immediately by anyone (and comments are highly encouraged!)

Hopefully everyone understands! I really don’t like imposing “rules” and limiting what my readers can do. But hey, it’s all in the name of fine tuning this thing and making it the best it can be!

Regards,
Jay