I love when people leave comments to my posts. It provdes a sense of validation, in that someone out there is actually reading my posts, and it also increases the “value” of my blog by creating a conversation rather than a monologue. So I’ve decided to make commenting more fun for people and also say thanks by way to spreading some Google Juice to all who comment.
So, here’s what I’ve done. The blog now run these plugins to make things more interesting:
- Gravatars2 is a plugin that adds Gravatars (Globally Recognised Avatars) to each comment. You can either get your own from the Gravatar website, but if you don’t have one, it automatically assigns you one from pool of around 100 images. So, you may end up being Homer Simpson today, or even an anime character!
- Brian’s Latest Comments is producing the “Latest Comments” list that is at the top of my SideBar. This points people at the recent conversations happening on the blog and increases their net worth
- DoFollow is a plugin that removes the evil NoFollow from WordPress‘ comments. Sometime back, this tag had been introduced by search engines to try and minimise comment spam but the truth is .. well it hasn’t. This plugin makes sure that people who comment get a link back to their site, both for people to click on and follow, and also for search engines to index. I would recommend this to anyone who encourages commenting on their blog.
Of course, there’s no way I could do all this without some proper spam filtering, and Askimet is still up there as one of my must-have plugins that everyone should turn on. I’ve added a little image on the sidebar that shows exactly how many spam comments it has caught so far. Impressive huh?
