Counting readings? Cool. How?

Whilst bashing leftists philosophies on child care at this blog I came across what I first thought was a script to count the number of pageviews, but turns out only to be the renaming of the comments section of David Alexander's blog (I wonder if he's any relation to the Dave Alexander who stunk up the Gateway. Was it Dave Alexander? There was a guy named Alexander. There was a Dave. Those 2 words might have been stuck together in nameform, and might even be the same guy. Can there be two leftwing journalists in their 20s named Dave Alexander who have internet savvy? Seeing how journalists are overwhelmingly left-wing, those two facts aren't linearly independent, particularly with the age thrown in. Alexander has to be a relatively common last name, and of course Dave isn't quite an uncommon first name)

Anyways, my point was that at first I was excited that I might be able to find out if anybody actually read this thing, barring putting up a stupid site tracking .gif that would only tell me about the main page, not any individual thread. I would very much like there to be a way for blogger.com to do this. It seems handy.

Also handy: a way to do permalinks on entries. This is a better way to show a post on Kevin Michael Grace's blog than just giving the link and letting you scroll down yourself. It seems blogger only lets you do it on some strange comment-laden page. I'm not opposed to including the comments when you permalink (its a sensible way to do it), but the page formatting and sidebar and all that should still be available.

Also also handy: a way to shorten postings on the "main page". For example, my lengthy computer rant below is using pagespace that could be used to discover.. the lack of anything below. Bad example. But if this site was more than a week old there might be useful content to be seen, if only you didn't have to spin your mouse wheel for 6 hours beforehand. Ideally, there could be some sort of blogger.com-specific tag in pseudo-HTML that let you indicate where the text was to be "cut off" on the main page. On the aforementioned computer rant, this could be where I said "the next day I made two changes:" If you were half interested in what I was writing, you could merely click the "view the entire post" arrow or what have you to expand the post. If you wanted to be really clever, the permalink button would be next to this arrow, but on all posts and not just the extra-long ones (not that the cutoff posts had to be horribly long.. for suspense purposes, why not do it on a short one too? For the terminally crazy, the first post could end with "What I won't be doing much of here is" to perhaps catch interest. Naturally, global preferences should let a dedicated surfer with a strong mousewheel finger override such editorial nonsense. But handy nonetheless.

Finally, what would be a tad handy (less handy than the above handy ideas) is to let site owners place specific post restrictions on specific posts. For example, if you find your political posts get a lot obnoxious trolls (which i'm sure the owners of blogs I've posted to in the past 3 hours might think I fit into), you could require the poster to be a blogger.com user to at least insure some creative insight. Maybe computer-related posts get all the LENGTHEN YOUR PENIS spams, so you'd want to force posters there to do the little word-thingy. Or maybe you're tired of banal posts on your popular blog being used as nothing but senseless blog promotion: make all comments anonymous. Hey, its a thought: I only come up with 10-15 of them a minute.