Building a Better Blog

We bloggers are always looking for ways to improve our blogs, or at least, I hope that most of us are.

Building a better blog requires figuring out what people want and then delivering it to them. One of the things I have found after a few years of doing this, is that comment moderation and the features of the commenting platform can be tools that help keep readers active and happy at the same time.

Yesterday, I finally installed Comment Luv with my Intense Debate commenting system. Comment Luv allows a commenter to type in their website url and then it will automatically pull the title of the last post as well as linking to it.

I only applied it to new posts though, because the wording of the installation confused me a little bit. It said that applying the application to existing posts would replace the existing comments.

What does that mean???

Replace - as in replace them with nothing?
Replace - as in put them back where they belong when the application is installed?

I decided to be safe instead of sorry.

I would be extremely happy if any of you has the answer to this question. If the existing comments will be safe at home, then I will implement Comment Luv on the whole shebang. Otherwise, I'll leave it as is.

I also decided to allow the comment section to appear on the front page if you click the link. Previously, I had a popup window, but I really hate popups of any kind, so I decided to change that. I also hate being led to another page because, well, there isn't a good reason for why I find it annoying, I just do.

KISS - Keep it simply sweety...

I'm trying to keep blogging simple for my readers, but that isn't always simple and in fact, can sometimes present quite a challenge. In the end though, I enjoy rearranging and redesigning my blogs. Now I just need to start actually analyzing which changes increase viewers and truly make it better.