Blogging Into the Future... Anyone There?

Greetings!!!

Well, I don't know if very many readers saw this post - maybe everyone was preoccupied with holiday things.  I was hoping it wasn't too close to Christmas when I originally posted, but maybe?  Anyway, the idea of doing the poll occurred to me and I wanted to do it before I forgot all about it.  

I REALLY, REALLY  would love some feedback about future blogging and anonymous comments.  Connecting to readers is why bloggers blog, right?  So I would love to hear from some of you, as per:

I have been thinking on and off about my blogs - maybe even moving them (google/blogger can be a mess sometimes).  Then I had a time trying to reply to my last comment from Nancy.  I finally was able to do so and in endeavoring to find out why I had such a problem, found out this:

Allowing the option of anonymous comments is important to me.  I'm sure at least some folks are concerned about privacy and also ad tracking.  Well, it turns out that in order to leave an anonymous comment here on blogspot, you have to enable third-party cookies.  What?  Basically that means more ad tracking at the least.  And you HAVE to do a captcha - although I started using that a long time ago, I no longer can turn off that requirement.  And since I've not put an e-mail contact here, I would basically not know if anyone has had any problems trying to post a comment unless maybe someone who knew me personally had problems and complained to me, but no one has.

So I thought a good step would be to do a poll to see if anyone has had problems or has any feelings about this.  The poll is located in the "navigation bar" or whatever just to the right of the posts.  I'm going to reopen the poll and leave it open until 11:59 p. m. on Jan. 4.  That should give plenty of time for feedback.  I did a quick test of a prototype and I believe you should be able to vote without enabling third party cookies. I encourage you all to vote!

Now I'm also going to ask for any ideas or info you good folks could share.  I've looked into a couple of ways to do alternatives to comments.  I thought of a guest book thing.  However, guestbooks are sort of "old-fashioned" and there are very few hosts - and they also might need more cookies and ad tracking.  I also looked at doing some sort of web form.  I even got so far as finding some model html commands and was able to do a "mock up" except for one thing.  If you do - I think it's "mailto" -  it opens a warning box to users and might also expose e-mail addresses.  I think I read that a better way would be to do some things in php language, but I really don't know code, and php looks REALLY bizarre to me, anyway.  Any thoughts or ideas on alternatives?

Or are there thoughts on moving my blogs to an alternative or using some alternate way to publish content?  I'd almost hate to do that -  it could get messy and trying to get you good readers to the new place might be just a bit of a challenge.  But I might be open if there's a good option but let's leave WordPress and facebook OUT of consideration here (all right, I am picky, but there are certainly way too many privacy concerns for me to even consider facebook).

So there it is.  Would really love getting some thoughts and input - and poll participation!