Anatomy of A Healthy Blog : Mini Community with Interaction

I’ve been blogging for almost 9 months now and keep fine tuning my blog. I’ve also making friends with other bloggers, commenting in other blogs as well as linking to related blog posts that I like.

Have been doing this, I can’t help that feel that blog is actually a mini community with interaction between its author with its readers. Blog is personal to its author, where it reflects and shares its author’s thought, hope, review, critique, experience and some other personal stuffs. That’s why many people also call blog an online diary. Blog is also social media where its author and readers communicate.

So I believe a healthy blog at least should have these components to support its role as a mini community:

1. About Page
   
   The author should introduce him/herself here. A brief introduction is enough as long as the readers have any idea who the author and why he blogs. If you are concern about your privacy, you can use a pen name
   
   This about page will give your blog a feeling of warm and personal to its readers.
   
   
2. Contact Page
   
   Contact page is necessary so that you readers can contact you for private and confidential message that can’t be discussed in the comments. I often use contact page to contact my blogger friends, and vice versa.
   
   I suggest you to use Enhanced WP-ContactForm plugin for your contact page to help you reducing spam by bots. This plugin requires the submitter to fill in the challenge response before the message is sent.
   
   
3. Comment Box
   
   This is where blog author and readers mostly communicate and have discussion. Comments are also great for the commentators to socialize among them by visiting their respective sites or blogs.
   
   
   
   To enhance your readers’ commenting experience, I suggest these following plugins:
   • Dofollow. This plugin disables no follow attribute in comments. Disabling no follow attribute allows the search engine spiders to follow the commentator’s URL and crawl it. Or in short, it gives a back link to the commentator’s blog or site.
     
     By the way, there’s a Do Follow community that you can join at BumpZee.com. It’s sole requirement for joining is that you must remove no follow attribute from your blog
   • Live Comment Preview enables the commentators to preview their comments before submitting the comments.
   • MyAvatars adds MyBlogLog.com avatars to Wordpress comments. It’s nice to see the commentator’s face there. It gives a personal feeling
   • Show Top Commentators enables you to display the most active commentators in your Wordpress blog. You can see it in action on my sidebar under “Top Commentators of The Month”.
   • Subscribe To Comments. This plugin allows you to get updates to subsequent comments from the post you commented. It is very useful to continue discussion on the comment.
   • WP AJAX Edit Comments allows your commentators to edit their own comments within a certain defined time period. I set mine so that my commentators can edit their comments within 15 minutes after commenting.

   To help reducing comment spam by bots, I suggest these plugins:

   • Akismet. It checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. I strongly suggest you to have Askimet activated in your Wordpress blog.
   • Bad Behavior denies automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site.
   • Peter’s Custom Anti-spam provides a captcha to verify if the commenter is human.
   • Spam Karma 2 is a spam killer plugin.

   In addition, make sure that you reply to all comments as a courtesy to your commentators. Quoting my friend, James Soh, “Blog post and comments are like a conversation, who wants to talk to a person who does not reply?” It’s very true so that I always reply all comments (although sometimes not immediately).
   
   There’s actually a community project for this, iReply Movement.

4. Providing Blog Updates
   
   Almost everyone loves to read and get updates from blogs with good content. There are two ways to get blog updates without visiting the blog:
   • Subscribing to autoresponder email (by using service from GetResponse.biz), or
   • Subscribing to RSS feeds
     

     RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

     RSS content can be read using software called a “feed reader” or an “aggregator.” The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

     Quoted from Wikipedia.

     Updates by RSS feeds itself can be received through email (by using service from FeedBurner.com or FeedBlitz.com), or by reading it through RSS reader or aggregator (such as RSSreader.com).

     I suggest these plugins to enhance your RSS feeds:

     • Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter inserts customized copyright message in your feeds. It helps preventing RSS feeds thefts (people who publish your RSS feeds in their blogs without giving you any credits).
     • FeedBurner FeedSmith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
     • Full Text Feed prevents WordPress 2.1+ from adding a “more” link to your blog feed.
     • Subscribe me adds a widget with feed subscription buttons. You can see it displayed on my side bar (the “Full RSS Feeds” icon with pull-down menu).
5. Spread the Words
   
   The next essential component of blog is social networking. There are many communities and social bookmarking sites that you can join such as BlogCatalog.com, MyBlogLog.com, Technorati.com, StumbleUpon.com, Reddit.com and BumpZee.com.
   
   You can share what you like to others using these social bookmarking sites.
   
   My favorite plugin for this is Share This. It supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.

Hope all that’s useful for you. Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing

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