If you’re an avid reader of my blog, you should probably remember that I blogged about the 4 most used blogging tools used by bloggers. And now, I’ve come up to make an analogy (once again)- about having tag boards or chat box aka Cbox/Shoutbox/Shoutmix to some bloggers’ blogs and just using an emal-me method.

When I started blogging, I used to use tag board for my visitors to drop their messages there. Even just short, hateful or sweet messages. But what I didn’t like about it which I realized when I opened DHD, was that most visitors (mostly bloggers) were abusing it. Tell you what, they tend to be so much lazy- when you have a note that link exchanges should NOT be done there, they will STILL drop message like “Hi. Link ex?” which I think is too annoying. What? Can’t you read the note? You do not know how to read? Or you’re just merely disregarding it? Drop the link exchange topic. Let’s move on and get over it. Another issue is, according to what I’ve understood, chat box is not plug board! That’s why it IS called chat box because it should be use only for chatting and not “Hello. I have a new post, hope you can comment.” Merely plugging your blog post when in fact you didn’t even comment to the owner’s post. I’ve BEEN there. But now I realized what the point is. For sure the author will return comments and will surely drop by to your site if and only if you commented on his/hers. But if not, what will you expect right? And the last is, some bloggers (or not!) who were haters of the blog owner tend to leave messages like “Hey! I don’t like your site, get a life.”, “*insert bad word here*”. And they won’t even leave a link of their site if they have one or just named themselves Anonymous! So how on Earth will the webmaster reach you to start a private conversation and to get the issue fixed? It will definitely lower your level if you start a war using tag board and come to think of it, you’ll be the loser after it because you made yourself unknown which is a sign of cowardliness. On a brighter note, chat box is surely helpful when the message is quite ASAP to read, like “Hey, your other blog has been hacked!”. So if the webmaster read it without checking her mail yet, she’s now informed. And besides you can monitor who your visitors are because they leave messages like “Hi! Dropping by here.” Heh, as you read you may notice I don’t like using tag board now.

About the email-me/contact-me method, I’m used to this now. It’s more of the professionalism of the blog owner. Not that who use tag boards are not professional or any of some sort but I think it’s decent, less wars and less of all negative issues. Besides, anything and everything can be talked over email right? :p It’s more of exerting much effort and be able to follow what should be followed. Talking about obedience, heh!

So, I think it ends here? FYI, I just wrote what I observed. If you’re against all these, comment properly, thank you! Site wise, I just finished validating my blog at XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.1 last night and mind you, it was successful after having more than 50 errors in XHTML and 15+ in CSS! You can check my footer for a proof? Yeah, I’m proud of what I’ve done!

Questions!
What do you think is much useful?
Have you use those boards before? (or even now?)
Are your site(s) XHTML and CSS valid?