Increase Conversation on Your WordPress Blog With These Two Free Firefox Tools

Although you may not believe it when I tell you this, there is a downside to having a popular blog. As comments and conversation increase, so does the time it takes the blogger to respond. In fact, I used to be able to respond to nearly every comment made on the site, and it broke my heart to have to give that up.

But last week Lorelle VanFossen from Lorelle on WordPress clued me in to two Firefox Greasemonkey scripts that have absolutely changed the way I am able to respond to people who want to join the conversation on my blog.

What is Greasemonkey?

It’s like a Firefox Add-on/Plugin that allows people to write scripts that alter the web pages you visit. They are usually created to make a web site more readable or usable. Do use caution in installing them, just like with any other plugin or freeware, because they can be created for malicious reasons. But these two are safe and you will LOVE them.

WordPress Comment Ninja

WordPress Comment Ninja makes it a snap to respond to as many comments as you want to all from one screen. This means you don’t have to go out to your blog, navigate through multiple posts and pages, and you don’t have to wait for pages to reload to continue the conversation.

On your Comment Page in your WordPress Admin Panel, Comment Ninja adds a “Respond” option, which opens up a dialog box right on the page. You can enter your response and it automatically adds a link at the beginning of your comment to direct it to the person to whom you are responding to. You can then either post the comment to your blog, email it directly to your reader, or both. And it will take care of any and all of that for you while you are responding to the next commenter.

Akismet Auntie Spam

With comment spam reaching epic proportions, I gave up on trying to find ‘false positives’ that Akismet thought was spam, but in actuality was a comment from a real person. I mean, how can you seriously go through 30,000 comments trying to find 3 or so real comments – or sometimes none at all. You could spend all day looking for that needle in a haystack.

Enter Akismet Auntie Spam, which sifts through all of your spam comments, shortens each to one line, and groups multiple entries into one line. Suddenly 30,000 spammy comments fit nicely on one manageable page, and you can then scroll and find the legit comments, which are quite easy to identify.

The first time I ran this script, I found more than 7 false positives (Sorry Dane!), even from people who had commented previously on my blog. I suddenly wondered just how many conversations never happened because I was prevented from ever seeing a reader’s response! But the best part was that I never had to read through the 186 comments that “noggroona” left for me.