Over on the Budding Bloggers Network, there has been a lot of discussion about helping fellow bloggers achieve their blogging goals. A couple of suggestions have been put forward including cross blog conversations (something I am yet to be convinced about) and a pro-active approach to encouraging comments. My latest suggestion is one that I have borrowed from my day job, the concept of peer reviews.
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As a member of the IET I was recently asked to complete a survey around how I conduct research and access information. I’d be very surprised if the survey reveals anything surprising, but I was surprised enough at one of my answers to consider elaborating on it here.

I am unable to remember the exact wording of the question and the IET won’t allow me to attempt the survey again so you’ll have to survive with an approximation to the question:

What sources do you use to acquire information and what aspects do you like about each source?

Read on for my response…

I recently installed the WP Comment Remix plugin and was stunned to see how often I had been neglecting to respond to comments left on my blog. While replying to a comment by ShriNagesh I was reminded of the Top 10 reasons why you must comment on blogs over at SmartAdvi$e.info.

If readers have a duty to leave comments then bloggers have a duty to respond to them. Here are my reasons why:

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I’ve made some behind the scenes changes to my blog. Most of these will be invisible to you, the reader, but they should help me keep things up-to-date and respond to comments more efficiently.

• Moved theme to subversion repository (link on request)
• Using subversion to keep blog & plugins up-to-date.
• Now using the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 Winning, WP Comment Remix to manage and respond to comments.
• RSS Feed switched to Feedburner to allow me to track statistics.
• Using Google Analytics to track comments.

Hopefully these changes make it easier to stay on top of my blog in the limited time I have available. I’m hoping that the next major update will be a multilingual version of the site.

Updates:
Here are a couple of screenshots showing what I consider to be the two key benefits of the WP Comment Remix plugin.

1. Screenshot 1
2. Screenshot 2

The ever popular blogging engine Wordpress has an accompanying iPhone application. Now at version 1.1 the application remains free and open source. It is well written, runs smoothly and has some nice touches that inspire confidence during use. It is a shame then that the focus of this application is on a task not suited to the mobile environment.

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