Blog comments

Q. how to send a message and if I do who reads it....................

A. I'm not too sure what you mean by 'message', I'm assuming it's comments.

Anyway, you'll probably want to know about comments too (these are the messages people can leave about your posts).

Setting up comments - all posts:

• I think by default, all posts have comments enabled however .....
  
• Sign in and view your blog. Choose Customize>Settings>Comments
  
• Now you can see all your comments options.
  
• I have chosen to show comments, let anyone make comments and all new posts have comments (ie. can be commented on)
  
• I have my comments show in a popup window (just my personal preference, I don't like losing the pages I am on, I prefer new windows)
  
• You might want to moderate comments - I do (when someone leaves a comment you'll get an email notification, you can view the comment and choose whether to publish it or reject it - stops any nasty comments someone might leave) - if you choose this option, be sure to enter an email address they can notify you at.
  
• After you've made your changes be sure to click 'Save Settings' at the bottom of the page.
  Setting up comments - specific posts:
  
• When you are editing/creating a post there is a link "Post Options" under the big content box in the bottom left, click it.
  
• Here you can enable/disable comments for this post only (sometimes you might notice that a particular post might not have comments enabled for some unknown reason - this is where you fix it).
  
• This is also where you can change the date/time of a post so that posts appear in a different order on the page (they are ordered by date/time) - this comes in handy if you've previously written a post and saved it as a draft but didn't publish it, later when you publish it you can change the date/time so that it appears up the top as the most recent post.

Moderating comments:

• You can either follow the link in the notification email you get OR
  
• Sign in and view your blog, choose New Post > Moderate Comments - this will list all of the unmoderated comments (if any) and you can either choose to publish or reject individual comments

Leaving comments:

• To leave a comment on your own blog (ie to answer someone's question) or another person's blog is the same (some blogs may differ slightly if they're not blogger blogs)
  
• If comments are enabled, at the bottom of the post you will see something like this > Posted by tigergirl at 8:10 AM 0 comments

** I notice now that when I leave comments on other people's blogs I can elect to be notified by email if there are successive comments - this is a feature I haven't explored yet.