Last week, my wife Robbie and I set up a blog site for the Valley Pond Townhouse Association where we’re members. The townhouses surround Hidden Valley Park in Northfield, Minnesota on three sides.

Last week, I posted an entry here titled Using email lists for weblog notification like I knew what I was talking about. For those of you who got my email notification via the Zoodoka service, you probably noticed a small problem: it didn’t work.

I should have taken more time to test it out over a week or more, which I’ve now started doing. I still don’t know whether the problem was my lack of understanding or a glitch with their service. Regardless, my apologies.

I’m back to using Dada Mail (formerly known as Mojo Mail) for the emailing of weblog headlines once a month or so until I’m more sure that a switchover will work.

I have a couple of leaders now who are ready to make selective use of the WordPress comment feature.

So I’m experimenting with it here to find the best way to make it easy for the site visitors, yet prevent spammers from abusing it.

Upon the recommendation of this recent message thread in the WordPress forums, I’ve enabled the Askimet, Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma 2 plug-ins, while avoiding the Captcha approach.

I’ve turned on comments and trackbacks on this and all future blog entries to see if it works.

I’ve added a little gizmo to my right sidebar here that indicates whether or not I’m currently logged into my Skype account.

For geographically distributed teams, I see this form of instant messaging (real-time voice and/or text chat) as the equivalent of showing up at an office, hanging your coat on a rack near your workspace, and turning on the lights — all little cues to your colleagues that “I’m here. I’m around. I’m available to talk/collaborate/socialize.”