No more Facebook blogging

So Facebook recently removed their feature that imports people's blog posts onto their Facebook profiles. I had been using that feature, but I was actually considering removing it.

For one thing, it meant that I'd have two separate comment threads on each post--one on Facebook and one on the blog itself. The Facebook thread got more comments, but it would've been nice to keep them unified.

Also, I think I might get a bit more personal here if it's not being broadcast to everyone I know on Facebook. Sure, the blog is technically more public than my Facebook profile, but unlike Facebook, the blog doesn't announce everything I write to everyone I know who happens to log into Facebook. Now my thoughts will--in theory--only be read by people who want to read them, so that might make me feel more free to write what I want. We'll see.

And Blogger allows anonymous comments, so you can easily leave comments without a Google membership. If you have any trouble with that feature, try to let me know if you have a way of contacting me. But I just tried it, and it let me leave an anonymous comment.

Blog comments

I have my blog synced to my Facebook profile so that whenever I post to my blog, the post also shows up on Facebook under "Notes." (If you're reading this on Facebook, you can find my blog through the "Info" tab on my profile.) That leaves me with a problem. People can leave comments on the blog itself, or on Facebook. The comments don't show up in both places, so people who read in one place can't see the comments in the other place.

I used to use a Facebook application (Simplaris Blogcast) made by someone else to import my blog posts to my profile. With that application, when someone clicked on the title of a blog post in my profile, it would take them to my actual blog. The problem is that it updated my profile very inconsistently.

I would like to encourage people to post comments on the blog itself rather than on Facebook. But how do I do that? I could stop syncing the blog with my profile, and hope people click on the link to my blog once in a while. I could go back to Simplaris Blogcast and just get some of my posts synced to my profile. Maybe they'll improve it sometime. Or I can keep things the way they are and put up with getting comments in two places. Anyone know any other alternatives?

The Map

Sometime in the very near future you may notice that most of the red dots on the map (on the right hand side of this page) have disappeared. That's because ClustrMaps (the service that provides the map) archives and resets the map every year, to prevent it from become a big red splotch. If you want to see a map that covers the last year or so, click on the map, then click on "Maps Archive."