As I was timely reminded yesterday, comments are important to some peoples’ blogs. So there needs to be a way of enabling your commenters to keep informed of the conversation. On a chatty blog, like Birds on the Blog it’s vital but on my transport blogs it’s not so important.

So what options are available for those that like reminders?

Disqus is used by a lot of probloggers and social media bloggers, it enables the conversation to take place in other web locations and be tracked back to your blog. If you are a big fan of stats and tracking, then this is the tool for you. If you click on the link it will take you to the WordPress page where it explains how to install. Easy, and easy to keep track of. It also allows people to comment using a login from another platform – like Twitter or Facebook as well as using OpenID or a Disqus account.

Tempus Fugit have created a fab plugin that has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times and that allows a commenter to subscribe to the conversation.

There is also Subscribe2 which allows html emails to be sent and is compatible with the latest versions of WordPress.

All this is lovely, and helps your community providing the plugin doesn’t conflict with your WordPress theme. If it does that, you are back to the drawing board!

Sarah

Related posts:

1. So you make your first comment on a blog…
2. Yikes! someone is going to steal my blog…
3. Moving your free WordPress blog to self hosted WordPress