Improvements to my site to increase the bi-directionality and conversation
I have previously indicated on my blog that I’m primarily interested in keeping the conversation up and engaging with people. My personal behaviours (engaging with people who follow me on Twitter and with whom I’ve met at tech events) are also indicative of this pattern. However, I had been remiss for the past few months to implement a few changes that would make interaction much easier.
While many excellent bloggers take a substantial amount of time to customize their sites with relative frequency, I am going to admit that I am, for the most part, somewhat reluctant to go into the techie parts of my site. Uploading plugins, activating them, customizing them, changing the theme, personalizing the site, etc. I know that all of these are things we need to do in order to facilitate and maintain good interaction between me as the blog writer and my readers, and amongst the people who read my blog.
The past couple of days, I decided to do some upgrading, and I’ve enhanced the blog with a couple of plugins. First, now all my comments are CommentLuv-enabled. This means that every time you drop a comment on my blog, this WordPress plugin will try and parse your latest post for display. How is this relevant? Well, it gives you as a commentator exposure as the title and link of your most recent blog entry will show directly underneath your comment (therefore creating link-love).
Second, I have enabled a handy contact form so that you don’t have to use your email client to send me a message. The contact form is in my About Me page. Third, I enabled “Subscribe to Comments” which will allow you as the reader to track the conversation that is occurring on the comments section. Finally, I have managed to install a stats package (not that I care that much about stats per se, but they do give me some sense of what people are reading).
Feel free to drop a comment (I am particularly testing these two plugins) on the blog post, and I hope it is useful for you as a reader!
Related posts:
- Restarting the conversation around depression and mental illness in Canada
- Improvements to the Skytrain stations
- Twitter and the bi-directionality of Web 2.0
- Plazuelas (Penjamo, Guanajuato) – a beautiful archaeological site
- To increase Vancouver’s friendliness, say "Ok!"
Rock it Raul! Love people who embrace constant and never ending improvement in their work and personal life!
Love that you have your twitter accounts posted FIRST, which is my medium of choice for communicating.
I despise contact forms! That being said I think they do have place and may create conversation what would have never occurred.
May I suggest you include an email address as well for those of who feel the need to email (i.e. way more than a tweet can handle in length or want to send attachments).
For me, if I click on an email address it will just open a Gmail window and I am off to the races so it is still convenient. Not twitter convenient but what can you do, what will compete with Twitter?
Keep up the great work Raul!
interesting.. sounds good to me. the reason i don’t often visit blogs (any blog) is that the convo is very unidirectional (unlike the conversation on message boards). so all you do to make it more conversational, the better. good job.
I was thinking of adding CommentLuv to my site as well – how much work does it require to integrate? Mind you, I don’t get all that many comments to begin with so there wouldn’t be all that much love. Must be something about not posting more than once a payday.
Chris’s last blog post..The Winding Down of Silly Season
I noticed a tweet this morning saying you’d added some plugins to your blog. I’m a plugin junkie .. that’s the geek in me.
Which contact plugin did you use? I like the idea of not having to use your email client to send a message.
My blog only gets a few comments .. guess if I posted more often, I’d get more comments .. funny how that works
I agree, anything you can do to engage your readers and create interaction is a good thing. Think Twitter may have changed the landscape in that regard.
Replying on Raul’s behalf because I’ve used some of these plugins myself – and cos I want to test his new Twitter plugin…
CommentLuv takes no work… just install. There’s things you can fiddle with if you want (eg register on the author’s site to enable extra features) but it works out of the box.
The contact form is ContactForm7. That takes a tiny bit of work to add in – you have to create a new page in your blog as a contact page and paste one line of code onto it which pulls in all the contact form functionality. Your WP theme should automatically display a link to your new contact page somewhere.
The twitter linking plugin is ‘Automagic Twitter Profile Uri’. Again it works with no configuration. That one’s a bit of a pain for me because it works out your twitter ID by looking up your email address on Twitter and I normally use different email addresses for different things. My problem not theirs
Jon Jennings’s last blog post..Twitter and Magpie
Naturally, your blog is bi-curious.
raincoaster’s last blog post..Crime Pays: Fundraiser for the Federation of BC Writers
Wow. Now then I know what commentluv does. lol. I’ve been hearing about it but do not fully understand what is so good about it.
I have added Comment Luv recently and comments have increased. However, I require a 20 word minimum for the link to be used. The idea is to cut down on comment spammers who want to get by with “nice post” comments.
Boris’s last blog post..The 109 Day Link Building Explosion Day 81
Hiya, i have come across your blog a few times when doing research. I own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a ton of spam? If so how do you control it, is there any plugin or something you can suggest? I get so much it’s driving me insane. I’m so frustrated by it i had to turn my comments off which i don’t want to do because i love peoples input. Also do you get strange jibberish URL’s in the spam that don’t even work or the domains are not even registered? Seems pointless (and odd) and i can’t work out why they do it. Thanks
I have to say that I am really impressed by it is to go through your blogand getting things rolling, this is an excellent site.
Hi Long time reader first time poster.
Great post it helped me alot.
Thanx