SQLServerPedia

This week, we have some developments that make me proud to wear the big hat around here.

Comments On Your Stories Belong On Your Site

Brett Epps blogged about the latest round of improvements to SSP.  Most of ‘em focus on making the site load faster, but my favorite one has nothing to do with performance.

As of today, syndicated blog posts don’t have a separate comments area on SQLServerPedia.  If visitors want to comment about your blog entry, they’ll click on a link to go to your own web site.  This isn’t just a switch you can throw in WordPress, either – we couldn’t have done it without Brett’s PHP/MySQL work under the hood.

This keeps all the discussion about a post in a single place, which makes life easier for bloggers.  Readers can interact better with each other regardless of where they found your blog initially.  Plus, if like me, you’ve implemented a Subscribe to Comments plugin for your blog, then readers will get notified whenever anyone else posts a comment too.  Since all comments will be happening in one place, it makes readers more likely to return as new comments are posted in one place.

This also perks up the activity on your blog.  As a blogger, I know it can be frustrating to put a lot of work into an entry and then not get any comments.  If comments ended up on SQLServerPedia, that’s cool, but it’s not as cool as having them end up on your own site.  Then as readers stumble across your site, it’ll look more active.

I don’t want to syndicate your site’s comments over to SQLServerPedia because I want you, the blogger, to have incentives you can use to bring traffic to your own blog.  To make it easier, use FeedBurner FeedFlare to add comment links to the bottom of your posts, because FeedBurner can automatically update the number of comments.  I talk about using FeedBurner FeedFlare in my Tips for Syndicated Bloggers.

Solving Plagiarism Problems

A web site popped up on the radar recently for attempting to plagiarize just about everyone in the database community.  They used RSS feeds to suck the content out of blogs and show it on their own site without any attribution whatsoever.  Several of us bloggers contacted the site and demanded that our content be taken down, and Quest’s legal department sent cease & desist letters to the site.  Eventually, the site’s hosting company intervened after we began sending DMCA violation notices, and the site’s down for the count right now.

For more in-depth coverage of the story, check out my posts on How to Take Action When Your Site is Plagiarized and the followup More Thoughts on Blog Plagiarism.

Is Your Biography Up to Date?

No, we’re not worried about writing your obituary, even though the #celebpocalypse keeps claiming more victims.  Instead, we’re kicking around the idea of including your bio from the SQLServerPedia Editors and Contributors page at the bottom of every blog entry you write.  If there’s anything you’d like to update, take a moment to go edit that page.  Try to resist the temptation to edit the bios of others.