Tag Archives: blogs

Essential Blog Commenting Features

There are only a couple of things needed, and really only one of them is essential, but the second is greatly appreciated.  The first and most important being a notification mechanism to updated comments since the last comment.  Meaning, if my comment to your post garners any responses, I want to know about it without having to spend time continually clicking back through your page.  Not only would that waste my time, but it would artificially inflate your stats.  Neither of us wants either of those things.  So please take the time to add a plugin, or some other tool, that enables this capability.  Else, don’t expect too many comenters to leave words on your posts.

The second, and maybe less important but still appreciated feature, is closing out the comments after so many days, be it 15 or 30, it doesn’t matter too much, but it definitely needs to be something reasonalbe.  Receiving a notification a year or so more past the post date isn’t terribly relevant.  Typically these trail off, so it’s not as big an issue, but the more posts to which you comment, the more likely you are to receive unnecessary notifications.  At some point we need to stop talking about old topics.  Thankfully WordPress 2.7 was smart/kind enough to make this option standard, with a default setting of 14 days.  Very handy.

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A Week’s Worth Of 50-Word Posts

It’s tough when you know you’re not going to allow for the necessary word count to fully explain a thought or idea, but it’s a fun challenge to say as much as possible, as clearly as possible, in a limited space.  The most attractive piece being the lack of pressure to completely fill the empty space.  Being tied to a maximum amount of words, created a more inviting environment for jotting quick thoughts.  I guess that’s the intent of micro blogging, except you only have a 140 characters, which isn’t quite enough to get 50 words.

A couple of the posts were worse off than the rest (There were only four or five, right?).  My Book Meme post not only left off Leah Culver’s Book Meme post , but should have instructed the reader to post the sentence in his own blog; a result of my shrinking the instructions to leave room for my own comment at the bottom of the post.  There just wasn’t space to say all I wanted.  Anyhow, a Book Meme search is pretty neat.

The second suffering post was that of my Google’s no good at social media post, and shouldn’t bother with acquiring Twitter.  Clearly, a point of view that requires a bit of elaboration supporting the claim.  Which is to say, that it’s work to write a full entry for such a topic.  I’ve put it on my follow-up list, and it involves things like Orkut, Lively, and PicasaWeb.  We’ll get there, don’t worry.

I enjoyed it.  It was an interesting exercise.  I had a handful of short posts I meant to write, but never got around to (as usual).  I’ll now be less concerned with my word counts, be they more or fewer.

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A Week's Worth Of 50-Word Posts

It’s tough when you know you’re not going to allow for the necessary word count to fully explain a thought or idea, but it’s a fun challenge to say as much as possible, as clearly as possible, in a limited space.  The most attractive piece being the lack of pressure to completely fill the empty space.  Being tied to a maximum amount of words, created a more inviting environment for jotting quick thoughts.  I guess that’s the intent of micro blogging, except you only have a 140 characters, which isn’t quite enough to get 50 words.

A couple of the posts were worse off than the rest (There were only four or five, right?).  My Book Meme post not only left off Leah Culver’s Book Meme post , but should have instructed the reader to post the sentence in his own blog; a result of my shrinking the instructions to leave room for my own comment at the bottom of the post.  There just wasn’t space to say all I wanted.  Anyhow, a Book Meme search is pretty neat.

The second suffering post was that of my Google’s no good at social media post, and shouldn’t bother with acquiring Twitter.  Clearly, a point of view that requires a bit of elaboration supporting the claim.  Which is to say, that it’s work to write a full entry for such a topic.  I’ve put it on my follow-up list, and it involves things like Orkut, Lively, and PicasaWeb.  We’ll get there, don’t worry.

I enjoyed it.  It was an interesting exercise.  I had a handful of short posts I meant to write, but never got around to (as usual).  I’ll now be less concerned with my word counts, be they more or fewer.

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