Last Update: 17/01/08
For Blogger Users
I've had a couple of people ask, so after searching through the Blogger FAQ, I found this link on Blogger
This step basically enables commenting on your blog, but you're not done yet!
Go to Blogger's default comment tags.
The first part looks easy enough, but the second code looks tricky. I would suggest just looking at the first code that Blogger provides:
So where do we put the code? If you're using Blogger, normally your posts will look like this:
Date/Title:
Blog content
So and so posted at Time | comments link normally goes here!
If you've forgotten where the "So and so posted at Time" code is, look for this and paste next the comments code above next to it:
Yay. So now you have comments on Blogger! But how about non-Blogger people?
For non-Blogger users
Actually if you're not using Blogger, there is a high chance that your blogging tool also provides a commenting form, and 99% of the time it will be there by default. I have used B2, Greymatter, Livejournal and all have default comments. At the moment, I am using Cutenews, which is a simple for noobs PHP blogging tool. While it came with a default comments form, I didn't enable it because I was quite wary of spam bots. When I was using B2 and Greymatter, the spam bots kept attacking and flooding my comments page with ads, which caused lags on my server which was pretty upsetting.
The solution is simple. If you are afraid of spam (and right now while there might be solutions online to reduce it, the spambots keep upgrading themselves to become even more annoying), use an external comments system. So if there is spam, the external website you used is affected, not your own website ;)
I use haloscan.com. You go in, and create an account with them. There are several common blogging tools haloscan has instructions for, if you have any of those, follow haloscan's instructions! They are quite foolproof I think.
For those who have none of the listed haloscan blogging tools, like me (I use Cutenews currently), select None of the Above/Manual. You'll get to a page which has a few steps for you. Step 1 should be easy, but Step 2 is tricky. The example on haloscan.com is such that if you want a separate comments page for each entry, you have to rename the tags in the code. However, when we add the comments script to our sites, they are usually default and repeated throughout all the entries. We won't be able to edit the comments tags every time and anyway, it's quite tedious!
So we re-examine the code:
If we want each comments page to be unique, we have to assign them something unique. I use the blog entry title. So for example, let's say I have 3 blog entries called "Hello", "Goodbye" and "Good Night". I can't possible edit every single tag from the above example "dog" to each of them. However, most blogging tools, especially those which run on PHP, have a certain code which calls for the blogentry without being specific. For example, in Cutnews, the script that calls for the blog title is {title}, so all we need to do is replace "dog" with it.
And voila! When you view your blog, each blog entry will have its own individual comments page which is unique by blog entry title.
The trick is figuring out which code in your blogging tool calls for the blog title. (Not all blogging tools use {title}) You can also try blog numbers as unique identifiers for your separate comments page.
