I recently experienced difficulty commenting at my Blogger friends blogs using my WordPress blog’s URL. Many of you had comments from me that basically said, “Please allow anonymous commenting on your blog again. It is only allowing registered Blogger users to comment, not WordPress users like me.” I finally decided that it was a bit odd that all of my blogger friends had gone hyper on their comments security settings, so I decided to test my design site. Sure enough, there was no longer the “Other” login option, the one that had enabled me to use my WordPress blog URL for comments. This left me with two choices: leave “anonymous” comments and manually code a link to my blog, or leave comments which will link to my Barefoot Blog Designs site. Neither of these were attractive options to me.

I wondered why Blogger would remove the “other” commenting option, and my guess was that it allowed people to leave comments while assuming someone else’s identity, since it didn’t actually require any form of login. I don’t know if this is correct, it’s just my thought. Of course you can do the same thing when leaving an anonymous comment, but I think most people are somewhat suspicious of anonymous comments in the first place.

This morning I noticed the Blogger comment form had changed yet again:

There was the option to login using my WordPress login, however that is for wordpress.com and would login to a test blog; my WordPress blog is privately hosted, so this option wouldn’t work. There are also options to login using your AOL/AIM, LiveJournal, TypeKey, or OpenID account. I’d never heard of OpenID, so I decided to research this option.

Based on information I received from two helpful posts (post #1 and post #2), I paid a visit to OpenID, created a profile, and then claimed my blog (see either of the two helpful posts for details). The only drawback for me was that I created two “personas” in OpenID, one with details and a link to this blog and one for my design site, but you can only display one persona. Oh well! I’m sure there are other benefits to having an OpenID, but for now just I’m happy to have this commenting option available.