Essential Blogging

Adding Comments

Unlike more traditional web pages, blogging is highly interactive, with the blog reader responding directly to the blog writer. This process is facilitated with blog comments — functionality to allow your blog readers to add comments to each posting.

At this time, Blogger doesn’t have a built-in comment system, but you can use any number of commenting software packages, particularly if you host your blog pages yourself and are comfortable with incorporating some coding into your blog. One PHP-based comment system called dotcomments (accessible at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dotcomments-support/files/) works well.

Tip

Another freely accessible comment system is SnorComments, available for download at http://www.snorland.com/scripts/snorcomments2/. This application works if you host your own blog pages and your system supports CGI.

However, if you’re not interested in server-side coding, or if you aren’t hosting your blog pages on your own server, you can still incorporate comments by using a JavaScript client-based comment system such as YACCS.

YACCS commenting is an online service that works with several blogging tools including Blogger and Radio UserLand. You begin the process of using YACCS by signing up for an account at http://rateyourmusic.com/yaccs/, providing information such as blogging tool used (this is important as it impacts the code incorporated into your blog), your name, the URL for the blog, and so on. You’ll also provide some basic operating instructions ...