The idea of having a blog is not just to sell books – although, hey, if someone’s moved to buy mine after reading one of my posts, I’m not going to stop them. But ideally, you’re blogging to offer your thoughts and ideas to the Universe, and maybe even get a dialogue going.
“Having a dialogue” implies that your readers are responding to your posts. And yet, one of the biggest problems I had when I began blogging on Blogger (also known as Blogspot) was that people had trouble leaving comments. Blogger’s native comments system had multiple quirks – the sign-in process was kind of crazy, and oftentimes it wouldn’t let people post replies at all. I ended up with comments about my posts on my Facebook page, on my Facebook timeline, on Google+ – everywhere but on the actual post. Makes it hard to get a dialogue going.
Blogger users, as well as Blogger itself, had come up with several workarounds. I tried a few, and they worked, more or less. But really, you shouldn’t need a workaround for something as basic as allowing a reader to comment on your blog. Continue reading “Adding Google+ Comments to your Blogger Blog”
Back when I was in journalism school, I was assigned to interview a professor I didn’t know for a story that would run on the campus radio station. On interview day, I yelled and hyperventilated all over my dorm room – to the point where my roommate said something to the effect of, “Gosh, Lynne, if this is so stressful for you, maybe you should change your major.” I calmed down, did the interview – the prof was perfectly nice and, in fact, probably had more radio experience than I did – and did not change my major. Then I went on to spend twenty years in the news business, and only occasionally suffered the sort of panic I’d had before that first interview.
Back when I was a little teeny writer, I read a lot of Nancy Drew books. I loved them – they were stories about a smart and resourceful heroine who faced a little bit of danger that wasn’t too graphic, and she always caught the crooks in the end.