Nothing to do with how great or how lousy the system is. Nothing to do with Entrecard in general, just that I cannot disagree more on how people behind Entrecard handle things.

In short, an Entrecard member’s account was deleted because he claims (pure claiming with no proof) that he could drop 300 cards within 5 seconds. This alone has got my disagreement. But things doesn’t stop here.

The member who got his account deleted was questioning for the reason, and the reason given was because he claims that he could drop 300 cards in 5 seconds, even without any concrete proof. Proof such as logs are not given—instead, Entrecard insist that they are doing the right thing to delete a member’s account with the claim alone.

Entrecard also mentioned that in order to restore his account, he must either:

1. Provide us with the details of the method you utilized to subvertEntrecard security or
2. Post publically on the same forum thread with the following exact wording:
   “I wish to apologize to my fellow Entrecard users for undermining their faith in the Entrecard system in order to boost my ego. I do not in fact have a method for automatically dropping cards rapidly. I also apologize to the Entrecard programmer, who is in fact awesome.“

Entrecard also demanded for a scan or digital photograph of a piece of paper, signed and dated by the member, with the following wording:

“I commit henceforth never to abuse, or claim to abuse, the security systems of Entrecard.”

This shows how proud Entrecard could be of itself. To me, all these shows that they doesn’t appreciate their members or even respect them at all. This have nothing to do with me, but it is enough to make me boycott Entrecard.

Visit the actual forum thread for more details.

I don’t know Jake (blogs at More Merchant) personally, but I have seen his head for several time as a 125×125 ad button via Entrecard. I saw it again today, but this time, even his body is shown:

Coincidence actually, for having a t-shirt ad via Project Wonderful just right below his ad. It was spotted at studkickass. It might still be there if you are quick enough. A bigger look:

The number of comments of a blog is occasionally being used as a metric to determine how active a blog is. Therefore it is important to make sure it is easy for someone to leave a comment on your blog. An example of a bad commenting system are those found on Blogger powered blogs.

I will almost certainly won’t want to comment on a blog that require me to click on the “Leave a comment” link, wait for the pop up, and only fill things up in the small window. In short, Blogger’s commenting system is just bad, very bad. If you are using Blogger too but and are looking for a better commenting system, then check Intense Debate out.

From an annoying Blogger pop up comment to Intense Debate

One of the best reason to switch to Intense Debate is that, it does not pop up, but integrate nicely on your blog instead. Meaning one can post a comment on your blog without leaving the post itself, just like those seen on WordPress blogs. Head over The Thinking Blog for a working demo. Watch the video below to see what features are offered:

Installing Intense Debate is easy. If you are using Blogger, you will only need to add the Intense Debate widget to your blog and you are good to go. I’m not paid for this post, but it just doesn’t make sense to stick to Blogger’s comment system any longer when you can have a way better one.

Majority of bloggers display their feed subscribers count using FeedBurner’s small chicklet. It is so simple to place one on your blog, you can even choose the color of your choice as well as changing the text inside the chicklet to something else.

But in case you prefer having more control on how to show off your feed subscriber’s count, a WordPress plugin called Feed Count will definitely help. As big as you want, whatever font you like, just anything that you can do with CSS.

Example:

There can be many reasons to style your own feed count, trying to stand out of the crowd that is using the chicklet, or in my case, enlarging the feed count to let everyone know there are only a whooping 6 subscribers at the moment, making visitors wanna take part in increasing the number.

All you have to do to style your own feed count is to download the WordPress plugin here and install it, activate the Awareness API in your FeedBurner control panel, and do the styling. A sample CSS is available at the plugin page.

Happy styling and good bye FeedBurner Chicklet!

Developed by Patrick of BlogStorm, Blogicon acts as an avatar system to be displayed in the comment section. Unlike MyBlogLog or Gravatar, the avatar will be self hosted by the comment author, and it will be displayed on all participating blogs.

The good of Blogicon is there is no need to register any accounts, just upload an image of 80×80 with the name blogicon.gif in your root directory (yourdomain.com/blogicon.gif) and it will be displayed everytime you comment on participating blogs.

The bad is no one is managing the system. For MyBlogLog, there is a team behind it moderating. If someone uploads an adult image as his Blogicon and he comments on participating blogs, it will be displayed—and that will do nothing good to the blog. Since the format is in gif, it can even be a moving avatar.

As we are required to upload an image to our host first before we can have our avatar being displayed, it is quite unfair to bloggers who are using Blogger or WordPress.com. As far as I know, it is not possible to upload an image to the root directory of a free hosted blogs.

Furthermore, MyBlogLog has had already a very large user base, resulting in less people wanting to install the Blogicon plugin on their blogs—but MyBlogLog’s plugin. MyBlogLog also make it 100% sure the author of the comment matches the avatar. Blogicon is retrieving avatars based on the URL the comment author enter. Meaning if I enter someone else’s blog URL while commenting, your avatar will be shown instead.

What do you think?