On commmenting on blogs
Meredith left a comment on this post about making an effort to comment on blogs - and I am with her on that. Though when I read people writing about how blogging means being part of a community and functions as a social media and so forth I do rather sigh. The reason being, I am rather out of the loop on all that because I simply can't comment on blogs from work (most things that remotely resemble a blog are blocked - but then occasionally they work) so I just read them in google reader. What this means is that to comment I would have to revisit blogs at home. And a lot of blog posts would be worth doing that for, but the problem is that I don't really want to devote that much of my life to blogs, and I mostly refrain from reading them at home. So I just accept that I am out of that loop, and as a consequence won't get as many comments here.
I do, however, aim to respond to comments on my blog at least, because I figure that if other readers are like me, if you leave a comment on a blog and get no response/acknowledgment from the blog author, you're unlikely to leave another one (or maybe that is just me - but I don't know what "no response" means - don't like your comment? don't wish to encourage you to read this blog? it's not worth a response? this blog is above the likes of you? too cool for you? or something else ... call me human but I like a response when I have contacted another human). So I was quite chuffed when I worked out how to do this at work, even if I am sneaky. See despite the fact that I can't actually access my own blog, I can get into the blogger dashboard. Clicking on comments in there gets me nowhere, but I can go into the actual edit post screen, copy the URL like this:
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=30667667&postID=7347540577819786422
into another tab, turn it into this:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=30667667&postID=7347540577819786422
(by adding an s and changing "post-edit" to "comment")
and voila, it works. But I am not always super quick at getting to that, because I can't bounce from an email.
So, anyway, that is my blog commenting explanation/justification to the blogosphere.