When to Turn Off Comments

Comments on a blog are crucial to building community, meeting others, and (most importantly) interacting with your readers.
We’ve written many articles here on the importance of having comments enabled. Even Liz Strauss has weighed in on the issue:

My personal opinion is, that if I read a really great article and I come to the [...]

Improve Your Confidence With Karaoke

In a crowded, smoke-filled room, a person asks me, “What are you singing?”
I stare at the blank sheet of paper in front of me, where I am to fill out my name and song request.
“I’m not sure yet. What about you?”
“Oh.” the person replies, “I’m not going up there.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“I get horrible [...]

In the Longest Day of the Year…

In the longest day of the year, hidden away in your personal oasis, you can get Google send 16350 visitors to your blog only by blogging about the first day of summer, or you can close your eyes and imagine how ICANN is going to open up the internet to those who will show full [...]

WP Grins - Lite

A while back, when I released the new commenting section for this blog, one of the requests was the inclusion of smilies.
I installed WP Grins, but the overhead of the Prototype library was immediately noticable on the site.
Since I was already using jQuery here, it was apparent I wanted to port the plugin over.

I worked [...]

What Readers Appreciation Can Lead To

Do you still remember the moment when you published your first post? What were your feelings? Were you anxious and eager to see readers commenting on your thoughts? Were you checking on your blog 100 times a day, from fear of not answering a comment fast enough? How did you feel?
All these questions popped in [...]