Getting More Comments - part 2

This is just a short post aimed at people with blogs hosted by Blogger - that's you if you've got blogspot in your URL. It might be interesting for others too.

When I first started blogging in 2008, I hosted my blog on Wordpress.  I always had issues posting on blogs hosted on Blogger and came to be a little annoyed by the process.  I found a solution but it wasn't ideal.

However, I decided to host my new blog on Blogger for a few reasons:

• I knew most craft bloggers used it
• I knew from using it in a previous job that it was pretty easy to use
• I liked the social aspect to Blogger - the followers widget is a lot of fun
• I wanted to understand it fully because I want to be able to help others through my writing (I'm planning some e-books and blogging is actually one of my favourite subjects to write about!).

When I wanted to move Handmade Monday over to this blog, I became aware that a couple of people hosting on other platforms weren't altogether happy as they'd had problems commenting on this very blog.

I wasn't aware of their problems at first.  You might have something similar going on and you won't be aware, either, unless someone has let you know some other way - by email maybe.

 blogging problems

Here's what I found out:

1. In your settings, you can decide who is allowed to comment on your blog.  It really needs to be set to "anyone". The "open ID" doesn't seem to work for everyone.

2. Some bloggers still won't be able to comment, unless (and this one's just plain weird!) the comments come up on a separate page - a pop-up page.  You can alter this in your settings with just one click.  It's worth a try!

A word about spam:

Spam comments might be less of an issue than you'd thought.  Google has a really efficient spam collector these days, so you could try letting some of your defences down (Captcha code, moderation, etc).  I've also noticed spammers often target old posts (they are particularly fond of posts that do well in search engines, perhaps unsurprisingly) so you could try switching your comment moderation on just for older posts.

P.S.  A huge thank you must go to Stephen of Soy of the North for helping me solve this.  Go and check out his fancy newly-updated blog!