Comments on blogging
January 11th, 2007 | 
Author: Blogging is a peculiar activity.With a normal website, you can look at the stats and see how many people are looking at your pages and even how they found them in most cases. With blogs, the site stats reveal only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, whilst we only get a relatively small jump in recorded views of Foreign Perspectives any time we put on a new entry, we get quite a leap in all the sites that we refer to so there’s clearly a lot of behind the scenes viewing of the entries. That’s down to the facility called RSS feeds by which people can view the site via the various blog listing sites. Anyway, net effect is that I’ve no idea how many people are actually reading the site.
Then there’s the comments on the pages. You may have seen a few entries with comments but I’ve received a good deal more comments than that. Snag is that the others are basically spam. That’s actually a good thing though as it shows that the site has a decent profile on the internet (otherwise they’d not bother trying to get their links onto it). Strangely, the vast majority of spam comments target one particular page from early 2005. Thus far, I can’t really see anything particularly special about the page but if the spamming of it keeps up, I’ll have to see about adding something to it to see how they’re finding it. It isn’t a single spammer either as you might think.
Whilst the majority of people running B&B or self-catering places incorporate their blog into their main property site, we don’t. How come? Well, way back we did do that in a way as it was originally known as Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings (which represent the early postings in Foreign Perspectives) were related to the property in some way but the later ones were more to do with our life in France and not really that specific to the property. Also, having the FP site separate gives us a lot more freedom in what we can write.
Still, aside from the current lack of feedback, it is quite an enjoyable activity.
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Posted in Commentary
You have your settings set up so that users must register before they can comment so that will turn off most people. I had that set up on one of my blogs and only got 2 comments in 6 months, I now get one every other day.
Do you have the Akismet WP plugin activated? That should stop most spam.
You can see how many RSS readers you have with some stats programs. I use http://www.w3counter.com along with a FeedBurner feed http://www.feedburner.com feed and that works well.