Monday, August 15, 2011

Comments 101

Last week, one of my readers asked me (over the phone) about how to post comments here, so here's a little tutorial.

First, I want to clear up a misconception. You DO NOT have to have a Google account to post a comment. You don't even have to put your real name. A couple of my readers have used the "Anonymous" option and then signed the comment with their pseudonym (screen name).

People who read blogs generally like to read comments, too. But that only works when people leave comments.

And people who write blogs LOVE to read comments.

And leaving a comment is easy.

At the bottom of each blog post there will be a bit of text that says "0 comments" or if I'm lucky "1 comment" and that text is actually a link. Click on it and a box will appear. Above the box it will say "Leave your comment" so type a comment in the box. It doesn't have to be long, just a little something.

Below the box it says, "Choose an identity" and this may be where the confusion is. There are four choices and if you don't have a blog or a website (or a Google Account), just choose Anonymous. You then have the option to preview your comment before choosing to publish it.

Your comment then goes to my email so I can approve it before it's posted to the blog for all to see (that's just a security measure to weed out spammers, although no spammer has found me yet).

That's it; it's easy! And you can comment on previous posts, not just the current one.

Part of what makes blogging fun is feedback and interaction, and you can comment on the comments, too.

So let's get some interaction going.

1 comment:

Barbara said...

A few additional tips, in case they help:

The link to post is under where it says "0 comments" (or 1 or 3 or whatever). It says, "Post a comment" and that's what you click on.

Under "Choose an identity," if you don't have a Google account or OpenID (I don't even know what that is!), you can choose either Anonymous or Name/URL. If you choose Name/URL, you can use whatever name you wish, and you do NOT have to put in a URL. That's the way I do it. Anonymous is also good.

One thing that might be confusing to some people is when you're reading the post from the front page of the blog (http://westoftaos.blogspot.com/) and there isn't any indication of how to post a comment or how many comments there are. If you are on that page, where you can see several blog posts, click on the title of the one you want to comment on; the title is directly under the date. When you click on the title, it takes you to the page for that particular post, and you should be able to see comments, if any, and post comments from that page.

When you have written your comment in the box titled "Leave your comment," you will then have to type in a "word" (a collection of meaningless letters) in the box next to "WORD VERIFICATION." This is another security measure that keeps some of the spam out, because it assumes a human typist, not an automated program for spamming blogs. Sometimes the letters are hard to read. If you typed something in and it doesn't match, you'll be given another "word" so you can try again. (I messed that up on this very post, the first time I tried.)

Then, once you've written the comment, typed in the "word," and chosen your identity, you click the orange button that says "PUBLISH YOUR COMMENT."

Please don't let the instructions put you off. It really is very easy to comment, and it makes blogs much more fun to have comments.