Just last week, I learned the true and ultimate purpose of comment in other blogs. I only started commenting since, I’ve joined entrecard and open myself into the world of blogging. Initially I thought commenting is a blogging chore and is a somehow a good blogging culture to practice that but, it turns out to be more.

Reason why I write this post is because, there are a lot of blogs out there which have different opinion about comments.

Here are some of the opinions: -

1. Commenting will drive you traffic to your blog…huzzah Seriously, I think this way of comment is super lame. Yes, you do get traffic from commenting that because, you attracted the blog owner to come and see you for who you are (owner must be thinking, who is this blogger and where he/she come from).Eventually, if you keep doing it often, you will establish a bond between your blog and the target blog and become blogging buddies. You can call it a virtual hand-shake. Sometimes, we are so eager in making money and profit from web, we forgot that our blogs are supposed to be our live journal and it’s driven by you. Commenting is a way people communicate to you.This is worst part, using super commenting bots just to drive traffic days are over thanks to akismet and google initiative to knock off all commenting spams. When, you are comment let it be true from your heart and write a good one related to the post because, the blog owner is also a living being well most of us…you can exclude the cron auto-feeding, for heavy google adsense abitrary ones…;)
2. Commenting will raise your profile…also increase your reaction
   
   Yes, it does. Especially, when you take part of technical/problem related discussion in comment and solved some problems. That itself will raise your profile and respect from other people. Again is not about showing off and getting some Technorati reaction number to rise.

   In our virtual world, sometimes we get emotional over virtual numbers which, being defined by electronic system for e.g. Page Ranking….awww my pagerank drops – and i feel emo whole day (yay I’m page rank-holic o_O does it make sense? come on the real world is still alive and kicking)

3. Commenting will increase your PR…and PR increase your Adsense revenue
   
   Woah…you must have worked hard for you PR (indirectly, working for google)…hopefully, google doesn’t change their PR algorithm, if it does…again you probably get upset. Real purpose of comment is in point 4. Read more…
4. Commenting is a way of communicating to the blog owner regarding the post
   
   Again, this is the only true purpose of commenting in the first place. Dont forget a post article MAY OR MAY NOT contained a TRUE FACTS. If the blogger makes mistakes, he/she should be corrected. It really doesn’t makes sense if a blogger post something fake…and your comment “this is nice post…i like it”. This is my one of funniest encounter when I run a webcomic blog, I see some blogger commenting “what a nice article this is” where else all i posted was a picture – omg doesn’t he/she read or maybe using a commenting bot?

   
   This is what I’ll do mostly if I’m commenting on a blog…

• Visit a blog and see if it open up my commenting mood. Sometimes, that blog just doesn’t have anything which interest me. But, its ok no need to get upset, sooner or later some other commenter will pop up and come to your site.
• Find top 5 posts which I think i can contribute…read about it.
• Make sure i have some OpenID, blogger account or gravatar – i love this..they are fun.
• Start commenting about the article. (occasionally, i DO crack some funny jokes). Thats it.
• Come back to see if the “owner” replies.
• Repeat again next time I’m free. If the blogs is actively social, I will even request for link exchange (you got yourself actively follower) and stumble it. Yeah, I really meant what I said.

I still remember the first time I’ve used WordPress, one of the word that caught my attention was the word “Permalink”. Just what is that? How is it useful? and what are “slugs” in wordpress? Check out the picture below.

Permalink to put it in a more simple manner is for the following :-

• To have your URL more human-readable instead of represented by trailling question marks with weird signs and numbers (sometimes these are known as query string). E.g. Susan previous wordpress does not have permalink setup, so her page has trailling question marks and numbers in it (http://www.somedomain.com/index.php?p=23. After setting up the blog with permalink, the url changes to a more human comprehensible form such as http://www.somedomain.com/2008/05/08/mountain-himalayas/
• Anything that is human readable is also search engine friendly, people end up finding your URL more relevant such as Susan’s case, her permalink to her blog post e.g. http://www.somedomain.com/23/05/08/mountain-himalayas/ is obvious somewhat related to the article about Mountain Himalayas.

Slugs are the words that represent your title of the post at the end of the permalink

• Let’s take Susan post for example, her article title is called Mountain Himalayas therefore, her slug by default is would be mountain-himalayas. You don’t have to mess around with slug for your article unless you have special characters or other language characters in it.
• Try posting an article called Today’s Topic and look for the slug once you save as draft, it will appear weird (encoded with numbers like %e2%80%99) because apostrophe is a special character and usually replaced with a number code, usually I just remove the number in my slug and make it more human readable as possible just to make it neater.

Is not compulsory to meddle with permalinks and slugs but, is advisable to do so, cause it makes your each of your post human, bookmark and search engine friendly.