Budding Comments, Blooming Ideas, and those darn embedded comments.

The garden blogging community is made of awesome. I know I've mentioned that before, and I'll mention it again. The generosity of spirit with which so many of you left thoughtful comments, ideas, suggestions to my last post...well, a giant group hug to everyone.

Of course, the absolute irony of it all is that this week I'm run off my feet with work commitments, and have little time to write posts or visit many blogs or even reply to comments. It goes like that in my world, however, and one must make assignment hay while the editorial sun is shining, so to speak. For now, I'll put up this post, which I started last night before receiving so many intriguing comments. I will be doing a further post with some of the suggestions, ideas, etc, but it might not be for a couple of days more.

I especially tip my garden hat to those of you who have long been doing what you can to welcome, encourage and otherwise communicate with other bloggers. Like many of us have said, there is just NO way to keep up with all of them, as much as we may like to. I don't even make it to every post of every one of my regular reads, and I don't leave comments on every post either. I do try to get back to people who have left comments here, especially those who are new or new-to-my-eyes.

Because comments are the beautiful flowers that bloom when we plant seeds with our blogging thoughts. If you're new to blogging, here's a huge suggestion: read other blogs, and leave comments on them. That way, others can see you, see that you have a blog too, come back and visit and leave a comment for you. As many have mentioned, it's a real delight writing a post and getting feedback from it. Everyone handles comments in different ways, and sometimes that depends on what blogging platform they are using. Wordpress allows an option for bloggers to comment back directly to those who leave comments; probably Typepad does too, although you'd have to check with someone who uses Typepad. Blogger/Blogspot on the other hand, doesn't give us that.

What Blogger does give some of us, however, is huge headaches when it comes to leaving comments on sites that use embedded comments. Those are the comment boxes that appear at the end of a post. It can take three refreshes or even more to get a comment to go through, depending on how the blogger has their comment approval set up.
Here's an example of what happens when I go to most of those using embedded comments. I write the comment, hit 'post comment', and get this "please try again" from Blogger.

If you're reading and commenting from within Blotanical, these sorts of pages will also cause you to lose your spot in Blotanical, by taking you out to a fresh page of the blog. I have no idea why. But if you are reading eighteen different windows like I'm known to do (okay, I admit, I am a speed reader and multitasking maniac), you might write your comment, hit "Post Comment" and carry on to another window, coming back only to find your comment is still sitting there looking at you.

So we hit "Post Comment" again, and this time we get this funny word verification box. This is how some bloggers prevent spam comments, and the Captcha words can actually be very amusing. But sometimes they can also be hard to decipher. And wonder of wonders, if you don't get back to the window within a certain span of time, that word won't work and you'll get ANOTHER refresh. Then there's often some assorted colourful language out of the person trying to leave the comment. What? I didn't say I swear at my computer. Well, maybe once in a while.

But in this case, I was sitting waiting for this, so I put in the captcha word and hit "Post Comment" for the third time...(cue dramatic music of some sort)

Well, sloppy darn and shuck the chickens, it FINALLY worked! In this case, the comment gets published. In some cases, you'll get another note telling you "Your comment will be published upon blog owner's approval". So unless you come back the next day or sometime later to see if your comment went through, you don't really know. A lot of us have written comments only to have them go into the place where safety pins and odd socks go, never to be seen again.

To my mind, it's overkill to have both Captcha and blogger's approval on. I see every comment because they're emailed to me, and I approve the real ones and send the spammers off to the place where the safety pins and odd socks are hanging out. They deserve each other.

In Blogger, we have two other options for comment posting: the popout window, which is what I use, or a whole other page for comments. Either one is pretty painless in my experience, whether blog owners use Captcha or just verify them themselves. But the embedded comment option is exasperating for many people, so I decided to write a post explaining why, if you use this option and don't get many comments, your choice of comment style might be the problem.

Whew. I feel like I'm teaching a writing class, and we've just done a marathon of discussing the challenges of getting work published. I hope this is some help to others, because it's not meant as a criticism in any way. Take a tour around the blogosphere, and check out bloggers that have 20, 30, 40 or more comments. I'm willing to bet some of those odd socks that most of them don't use embedded comments. Anyway, that's enough out of me for today, and as a reward to all who slogged through this, here's a photo of that amazing orchid cactus bud, which opened on Saturday, much to my delight. There would be many more buds but for a certain very naughty little cat...