a Blogger verification secret; & a dissertation on responding to blog comments

Have you noticed that Blogger’s comment verification (to prove that you are not a robot) has reverted from a jumbled collection of letters and a photographed number to their previous format: a jumbled collection of letters and a recognisable word?

Well, I have stumbled upon a “secret”: no matter whether the jumbled letters occur first or last, type only them – ignore the “real” word (which is, of course, easy to read). In every case where I have tried this, the comment always publishes! I have tried typing only the “real word” and that doesn’t work; but type the non-real word (is that an “unword”?) and it works, every time (just as omitting the numbers always worked!).

When will Blogger make it easy for us and just have a simple maths problem to solve or, better yet, a little box under the comment which one ticks to prove that one is “not a robot”?

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And now a short dissertation about bloggers who don’t respond to the comments left on their blogs (please don’t stop reading now – you may agree with me, or you may not realise I’m talking to you!).

I don’t respond to every comment that’s left on my blog but I reply to the vast majority of them. I think it’s good manners to simply say “thank you” or to show the commenter that the time they have taken to leave a comment is worth my time in response. That’s how friendships are built, online and in the real world!

We all like receiving comments. it makes us feel good, like someone is reading and cares about what we have to say.

I concede that it’s good to keep the conversation going by replying to those comments in the comment section of your blogs but…

If you post with Wordpress, we who post with Blogger don’t get your responses! Did you know that? We don’t know that you have replied to our comments! (I only discovered it by accident when I went back to an old post to check something and found out that the blog owner had responded to my comment! Up until that point, I thought that my comments hadn’t been worth answering!)

From talking to other bloggers, rarely do any of us go back to posts that we have already read to see if a reply has been left on our comment. We just don’t have the time. We could, of course, tick the little box that invites us to receive (by email) the comments that are left on your blog posts after ours – but I, for one, don't want to sort through dozens of comments in my inbox which are largely irrelevant to me!

Those of you who have had me following your blog for a long time, know that I am a faithful commenter. It would be great if I got a response to even half the comments I leave on other people’s blogs!

Since the list of blogs I read is now over 150 and I comment on about 80% of all the blogs I read, I have begun sorting through them and eliminating some. Want to know which ones I’ve eliminated first? That’s right, the bloggers who don’t ever respond to comments I have left! Mostly because I feel like they don’t consider my comments important. There are some “never-reply” blogs still in my reading list; blogs I’ve been reading for a long time, blogs where I know the blogger personally, or blogs I really, really enjoy or whose work I really admire.

So, please, fellow bloggers, if people are kind enough to take the time to leave a comment on your blog and you can contact them, either by email or visiting their blog, please, please, please, do us the courtesy of responding! Don’t just leave your response on your own blog – chances are that we will never see it!

So, what do other bloggers think?

testing

Carol, at Fun Threads, suggested I try Windows Live Writer to publish my blog posts since I have been having so much trouble with B**

So, this post is a test to see how it works. This is a photo of Younger Grandson taken in November 2011. It loaded to Writer instantly – let’s see how it goes when I post to the blog.

Fingers crossed!

eta: It took less than a minute to come across to Blogger as a draft where I have edited to add this sentence! Man, if you have a Hotmail account, you should really give Writer a go! I'm very impressed (mind you, I have only used it this once!)

Thanks Carol!

PS My previous post, about our first attempt on the quilting frame, has been edited to add photos. The hyperlink will take you to the post with photos. The text is the same as the original but it is a different post because the original post had comments but I couldn't add the photos to the original post!

problems with Blogger

Is it only me or is it a universal problem? Blogger won't upload photos if I have it set on "updated" editor. So, after reading Blogger help, I changed my settings to "old editor". Now I type my post and add photos in "old editor". Then I change the settings to "updated editor" so that I can add captions to my photos.

Notes to self:

• Don't fuss with the format of your post in "old editor", because when you change to to "updated editor" the formatting will all be lost.
• And make sure you add all your photos the first time, otherwise you'll have to format all over again!

What a drag!

Blogger and Bloglines

Recently, Jocelyn wrote a post about the pleasure of having comments forwarded by email rather than "hitting refresh on blogger in the vain hope that someone has left me a comment".

Another great time saver in the blogging world has to be Bloglines: where you can have all your favourite webpages [not just blogs] listed for you each time something is added. For example, I have over 50 blogs on my Bloglines but today I only had to read 14 blogs as that was how many new posts there were. And Bloglines shows me which are the unread posts so if I have 200+ posts to read [as I did earlier this year when I fell way behind] I don't have to go back through the blog trying to remember what I had and hadn't read! I also got a nice shock today when I found that I have 20 subscribers - thank you all!!

Edited to add: And thank you to the two readers who are following my blog through this new tool of Blogger's - I haven't even looked at it yet but thank you to both of you for publicly stating your 'following'.

So three cheers for emailed comments and three more cheers for Bloglines. But when is Blogger going to ask [as Wordpress does] for email addresses so we can reply to the comments instead of seeing "noreply-comment@blogger.com"? Hmm?