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Brief notes
I know, I know: I haven’t been posting very regularly just lately. What can I say? I’m sorry. I don’t know if it’s the New Year or cosmic rays, or the value of the pound but nothing has really sparked me enough to make any comments (well, that’s not quite true, but I think everyone else has said everything I would say quite eloquently enough so I’ll stay away from the subject).
Which leaves us with the latest installment in the ever popular Brief Notes series; you know you love it!!
Politics
Everywhere I turn on the Net and TV these days, I can’t seem to get away from the US presidential candidate elections. So, you guys have an election to select a new leader for your party? That’s novel – you’d think Tony might have picked up on that one, being such a good friend of Dubya.
What I don’t get is all this caucus, primaries, Super Tuesday sort of stuff. It’s like you’re voting to be able to vote or something. But then the whole voting system in the US seems screwy to me; all that electoral college stuff – what’s that about? (Well, other than making sure that the man with the least number of votes get the job, of course).
Blogging 1
One of my pet subjects; there should be a further episode of my Going Self-hosted Guide in a few days but I just wanted to mention spam today. If you have a blog, you get spam; there’s no avoiding it. Wordpress.com blogs get Akismet (whether they want it or not) to filter theirs and it’s OK-ish (although just recently it seems to be somewhat over zealous and is creating a lot of false positives). On a .org blog you have a choice and thanks to a tip from Cornell Finch, I’d say drop Akismet and go for Defensio. I”ve only installed it today, but all the comments I’ve read about it rate it very highly and you do get more control than with Akismet.
Blogging 2
I read a lot of news feeds and since changing to the Mac, I’ve tried out lots of different feed readers. One of the ones that I tried and liked was NetNewsWire, but as it was something you had to pay for (albeit not very much) I ended up plumping for the free of charge Shrook instead.
Shrook is a very good piece of software for reading blogs and I’ve been using it for several months, but there was always something about the way it looked that niggled me. But today comes the announcement that NetNewsWire is now free, so I’ve switched. It just has a nicer feel to it than Shrook and I’d recommend checking it out.
Blogging 3
Over the last day or so, I’ve been having a discussion with another blogger about comments; he was complaining that his relatively new blog never got any comments. He seemed to be taking this as a personal affront, and even suggested that a third blogger only got comments because she sometimes wrote about sex and was “selling herself”.
As an aside to the issue, I started to wonder what other bloggers experiences were with comments. Did it take you a long time to get your first comment, or were you getting lots of comments from day one? Do you see more comments when you write about certain subjects, or on certain days, or is there no pattern at all?
Throughout the life of The Wolf’s Howl (first at Wordpress.com, then Blogspot and now self-hosted) I’ve seen comments go up and down like a yo-yo. I don’t get all that many, but then I don’t get a huge number of visitors.
And what’s your reaction when you do get comments? Has the newness worn off the experience and it’s just another comment, or is it still irregular enough that it’s like a little present, a reward for writing a post that someone else not only read but took the time to write about?
Football
Well, Eastbourne Borough finally got beaten in the League on New Years Day (shame!). But that’s the only loss so far – 22 games in – and they’re second in the table with two games in hand. Just need the team above to have a couple more losses and we’ll be in like Flynn!
Comments
6 Responses to “Brief notes”
Wolfs Helpers
when i first started blogging (two years ago), i was writing for myself. nobody knew i had a blog, and i didn’t know how to promote it. naturally i didn’t receive many, if any, comments.
few months in blogging, i got a trickle. that was only because i had commented in other blogs and the bloggers are kind enough to return the favour.
few more months into blogging, i made some blogging friends, and we exchange comments on each other’s blogs. i discovered the wp.com forums and that pulled some hits, and eventually some regular readers too.
it was only after a year of blogging that i get comments regularly. unless my post is a clearly personal post or if i turn the comment options off, i always get one comment at least.
i like to think that the number of comments i get reflects my friendliness (because not many would want to leave a comment in an unfriendly blog) and also my content (because you have to write something that appeals to your readers in order to get comments).
regular readers are more generous in commenting than passers-by stumbling upon your blog through search engines. so in order to get more comments, you have to build a readership first. and you have to start the ball rolling by being generous in commenting yourself.
sorry for rambling!
sulz »
No rambling detected here and thanks for dropping by. I think you’ve highlighted the very reasons why that other blogger wasn’t getting comments.
I always appreciate it when people respond to a post I’ve written; I see from your blog that you respond to every comment that’s made – I’m never sure on that point. If I don’t have anything to add to what the person has said, should I still say something to acknowledge their comment or is that not generally expected?
i like to acknowledge people’s presence in my blog, even if i may not know exactly what to reply. it’s like in real life, i wouldn’t ignore a person who’s talking to me. if i really don’t know what to say, i’d just say thanks for the comment, with a smiley.
i don’t respond to all comments, though. the first one, yes, the second or third, if i don’t have anything to add, i don’t feel inclined to leave a reply for the sake of replying.
my personal pet peeve about commenting is selective response by the blogger. it’s probably not personal, but i dislike it when a blogger chooses to reply to certain people (especially when it’s my first comment in the blog); it’s like as if my comment wasn’t even read. if the blogger doesn’t reply to any comments, it’s not as bad to me (though of course i’d like to be replied to!). if the blogger and i are regular commenters in each others’ blog, i don’t mind it then.
sulz »
[Just so's you know, Defensio doesn't seem to be working too well so far - I've had to rescue both your comments from the Spam folder.]
Looked at in the context of a conversation, I see your point. It would be rude to ignore those kind enough to leave comments – especially if they’re “long time readers, first time commenter” type people. Thanks for your insights.
no problem. i forgot to say thanks for the link love! maybe my nickname sounds like a bad brand of medicine.
and please don’t feel inclined to reply this comment if you don’t know what to say, lol.
On the akismet v Defensio debate, I use Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma 2 and I am spam free. Well, possibly not quite true, I did have one human written comment that I didn’t like the look of – the url looked a bit spammy, so I edited the url and left the comment.
I tend to get hardly any comments, but that’s ok. The blog is written mostly for me and occasionally for others so I don’t mind not getting comments too much. Though if I write a fantastically useful post I would like a few more comments
As to responding to comments – if the comment is written to me I respond, if a couple of commenters are having a onversation/discussion, I let them get on with it.