Chapter 9

Building Community with Comments

In This Chapter

Discovering what comments are and how to use them

Maintaining and managing your blogging community

Dealing with spammy comments on your blog

Handling negative comments on other blogs

Every blog should have comments. Love them or hate them, they’re an integral part of blogging. Comments provide the main source of interaction between you and your readers. Visitors to your blog can ask you questions, correct your writing, suggest your next blog topic, or leave a note to say hello.

Unfortunately, as interesting and thought-provoking as comment conversations can be, they’re not without their challenges. Comment spam and negative commentary can take the joy out of blogging and make managing comments on your blog feel like a full-time job.