When running a site like the Voxeo blog portal that features a “network” of different Voxeo blogs one of the ongoing challenges is handling comments. Not whether or not to allow comments… we have a very clear comment policy and publish all comments that comply… but rather just dealing with all the comment spam and moderating those comments that get through. We pay for an Akismet subscription, and that catches the vast majority of spam that hits our blog comments, but I also run the blogs in the moderation mode that requires your first comment to be approved by an administrator prior. Subsequent comments then are posted without moderation. I do this primarily because even with Akismet I was still finding spam getting through.

But this means, of course, that I or another blog admin have to approve all the initial comments.

While I get the email notifications and can simply click on the link to approve a comment, I often don’t have time to do it right then or I can see that it’s an obvious (unpublished) spam comment to ignore, and so I wind up approving or spamming a whole bunch of comments at the same time. I will login to one blog… but then I need to go to the next… and the next… which I don’t find as easy to do in the WordPress web interface.

Enter WordPress for the iPad….

It turns out to have a really nice interface for going into each blog and looking at the comments:

Wordpressipadcomments 1

I can just tap back to the list of blogs, go into a new one, moderate comments, tap back and go into the next… all with the wonderfully intuitive and easy interface of the iPad. Simple and easy to do.

Now the caveat is that when I do this I generally don’t have a LOT of comments to approve or trash. If I had a lot, the bulk tools of the web interface would definitely be the way to go. But for just handling a few comments in each of the blogs, it works great.

If you have an iPad and haven’t tried out the free WordPress app for the iPad, give it a whirl… it’s rather cool!

Originally from Voxeo Blogs