By default, the blog software that I’m using (Movable Type) has you enter a name, email address, and an optional URL for some Web site whenever you comment on an article. If you’ve entered both an email address and a Web site, then when you click on the name of the commenter, it will take you to the site rather than send them an email. (If you leave the site blank, it will send them an email.) The thinking here is that if they bother to fill in a URL, it means that it’s a personal site, on which can be found their email address anyway.

When I first installed and configured Movable Type, I removed this feature because I didn’t like the fact that clicking on the name of the commenter did different things depending on how they’d filled out their comment form. I’ve since reconsidered that and put it back in. While both the name and email address are mandatory fields, it will now be their Web site that’s linked to (not their email) if you click on their name. (If, for whatever reason, somebody wanted to send an email to a commenter, and the commenter’s site did not include an email address, I could always retrieve what they’d entered via Movable Type’s administration panel.)

I’ve reconsidered for two reasons. First, I think a lot of people wouldn’t mind advertising their own site – but really couldn’t care if they got personal email or not. Secondly, I could think of no non-intrusive way of keeping screen elements minimal and consistent. (At first, I imagined something like “Jason Bassford *”, where clicking on the name would send them email, and clicking on the asterisk would take you to their site – but that’s not very obvious, and a lack of it doing something obvious is, to my mind, even less acceptable than it being inconsistent. Alternatively, actually spelling out “Jason Bassford / Site” seems somewhat redundant if you know how things work, not to mention that it takes up more space than I like.) Besides which, once somebody understands the relationship between entering a URL and what the link assigned to their name does, it makes sense.

I did try to clarify things a bit by having the input box on the comment screen labelled “Personal Web Site” rather than just “URL” – which isn’t really all that informative if you think about it.