Blogger Comment Form Under Posts

Js Kit creates ajax based tools for blogs. But unlike other websites there code is easy to install, gives good user experience and most importantly its free.

Below are the codes which you can install on your blog, and can have better interaction with your users.

If you are using blogger then search for the term Data:Post.body in your template and just below that copy paste any of these codes to get their respective functunalities.

User Ratings For Each Post
<div class="js-kit-rating" title="" permalink=""></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/ratings.js"></script>
<span id="fullpost">


User Reviews
<div class="js-kit-rating"></div>
<div class="js-kit-comments"></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/reviews.js"></script>

This is the most important feature, users can actually write comments and can track replies without leaving your post as everything is handle using almighty "AJAX".

<div class="js-kit-comments" permalink=""></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/comments.js"></script>

If you want to create interactive polls, Copy this code in your blog somewhere, and visit http://js-kit.com/settings/ to create or edit polls.

<div class="js-kit-poll" style="width: 350px"></div>
<script src="http://js-kit.com/polls.js"></script>

It gives you options like block user, delete comments and reset settings. There is no need to create an account just copy paste the code and it will work. Important thing is you copy paste the code from your Home machine, as it gives admin privileges based on IP address of the installer.

you can always switch over to new machine with different IP by following simple instructions on your setting page.

To see the code working, please look under this post and you will find ratings, and comments section which are using this awesome bit of kit.

Tip: Use the review code for getting the functionality of ratings and comments together

Why Disallowing indexing of Labels in blogger is not good.

Recently google has added a default robots.txt file to every blog on blogger. It can be accessed by typing /robots.txt after your blog's URL. So in case of this blog robots.txt can be found at http://techlondon.blogspot.com/robots.txt. This is how it looks

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://techlondon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

This has been done to prevent google and other search engines from indexing duplicate contents on the blogs. Main advantage of this is that it now tells all the major search engines that they should index latest 25 posts of that blog.

Sitemap: http://techlondon.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

But what really bothers me is the line Disallow: /search .

Blogger beta does not provide much extendibility for search optimization of blogs Each and every page will have similar title which is concatenation of Blog's main title and Post Title, Label Title or Archive Title.

But there is a tweak for this which can be used to show Page specific titles
So for a Label page
like http://techlondon.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Adsense we can show Title of Page as Google Adsense Tips, Optimize Adsense, Make money using Adsense which is more specific than the current title Techlondon: Google Adsense.
Use the following code in header template to replace

<Title><data:blog.pageTitle/></Title>

with
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>

<Title><data:blog.pageTitle/></Title>

<b:else/>

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://techlondon.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20Adsense"'>
<Title>Google Adsense Tips, Optimize Adsense, Make money using Adsense</Title>


<!-- Similarly you can add more label pages to this list -->

<b:else/>
<!-- for all other posts -->
<Title><data:blog.pageTitle/></Title>
</b:if>
</b:if>

If you are not with me, what exactly i am trying to say here is that i could actually make my blog more search engine friendly by telling more about my pages, and could easily get more users from search engines.

But this new sitemap feature which does not allow search agents to index any page on blog having URL that prefixes with http://techlondon.blogspot.com/search/ and it has made life more difficult for bloggers who were aware of this trick.

There is another alternative to this which can be used to increase your traffic, but i am unsure if my follow bloggers will understand what i am talking here.. but if i make some sense please post a comment and if response is good i will be more then happy to share other options which can do wonder for your traffic.

Blogger Blog Now allows E-mail Subscription of Follow up Comments

Yesterday i wrote about how you can redirect your domain name without www to one with www prefix on blogger blog, and today another interesting feature has been rolled into Blogger blogs, you can now subscribe to Comments follow up via Email for Blogger blogs, only limitation is thatyou should have blogger account to get these email updates, and it won't work for users not using blogger account, unlike wordpress which does allow email feed for anyone providing an email address.

This feature though will help both Bloggers and readers, Bloggers can expect more returning visitors and Readers can get feedback for their comments which always gives great satisfaction to readers and they may get involved in more discussions on the blog.

other feature i would personally like to see on blogger is to have Comment Submission form on the Same page of the post, like wordpress. This will add to more people commenting on Blogger Blog posts.

I have previously on some of my blogs used a javascript hack for posting comments under every post on homepage of a blogger blog, and it does increases the percentage of visitors commenting on your posts.

Blogger blog does not work without www ?

This is one of the most common DNS error that exist with most of the websites, and if you were using custom domain name on blogger, situation gets worse. As you can only specify domain name with prefix www or without it.

What's more interesting is that blogger staff has never bothered about such a big issue in past, and lot of popular blogs might have lost millions of visitors due to this small bug. Good news is that finally blogger has added a feature using which we can redirect http://domainame.com to http://www.domainname.com or vice-verca.

all you need to do is to go to your settings tab, click on Publishing and check the opion Redirect domainame.com to www.domainname.com.



It takes few hours to get fully functional, but it does work fine. If you are using custom domain name bought using google checkout at godaddy.com, then you don't need to worry as it works fine by default.