Commenting and discussion

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This site welcomes visitors to add their comments to posts. (Later on, we'll be adding message boards that will foster even more interactive discussion.)

This basic tutorial for web/blog newbies will address how to track and read comments. Joining the discussion and writing comments will be discussed later.

Reading comments
If readers have commented on a post, those comments will be published on the full-post page, below the original post.

You can tell whether a post has comments or not when you are reading the excerpt on the front page (or other pages where posts are listed with short excerpts, like monthly archives), because the text of the comment link below the excerpt will change:

  • If no comment has been made, the text will read “Add new comment” and the link will take you to the comment entry form under the post on the full-post page.
  • If at least one comment has been made, the text will read “X comments” and the link will take you to the first comment, again on the full-post page. The original post (which the comment is about) is on that same page, and you can scroll up to read that (which you probably need to do if all you read on the front page was the excerpt).

That might be confusing, but if you see (from the text of the link as described above) that comments have been made to a post, you can just click on “Read more”, which will take you to the full-post page, where you can read the full post, then continue on to the comments.

When bypassing the post and going directly to comments comes in handy, is if you have already read the post (and maybe commented on it yourself) and want to read the new comments that have been made since your last visit to the site.

Tips for following recent comments:

  • On the front page, a list of the five most recent comments are shown, with a link directly to that comment.
  • On the “Recent posts” page (there's a link with that text in the left sidebar of every page) each post is listed in order of the recent activity it has generated, and the time passed since that activity.

    So, as soon as someone comments on post, that post jumps to the top of the recent activity list, ahead of other posts published more recently, but without any commenting.

Participate in the discussion — making comments

This will be added soon.