Another feature I like a lot are Gravatars. A Gravatar is a globally recognizable avatar. You register on their website with the e-mail address you use when commenting, and on blogs/sites that have Gravatar enabled, you’ll see your little avatar on all those sites.

It gives you a quick visual effect to recognize people who often comment, and if the author has a Gravatar, it’s often much more easy to recognize comments from the author, by just scrolling down and looking for the avatar.

Here’s mine:

I use this image on every website where I can upload a personal avatar/icon. It allows people to recognize me!

How it looks when you fill out your comment and check the commentluv checkbox.

That nifty feature is CommentLuv.

Showing the link in the actual comment.

Most users, or so I assume, like getting something back when they take the time to leave a comment. Which is, linkage back to your own site! By having the CommentLuv plugin installed, you can give the users the option of not only adding their general website address, but also allowing them to highlight an entry.

And this one, just because of the way she’s squeezed herself in between the couch and her owner’s thigh, just to sleep.

And here she looks nice!

I can of course subscribe to the comment feed, but that’ll just clutter my feed reader. Instead installing a plugin that allows users to subscribe to follow-up comments allows them to more easily take part, and can make them come back, when they actively see that there are replies to the entry they commented on.

One such plugin, which I personally use, is: Subscribe To Comments. When the commenter checks this box, s/he will get an email notifying them that there are new comments on that particular entry. This requires minimal effort from the user, all s/he has to do is check a box and that’s that.

And removing your subscription is just as easy.

When you leave a comment, what’s your preferred way of checking for replies?

404 Page Not Found

Nothing is more annoying than clicking on a link, and finding out it doesn’t work any more. But sadly that often happens, because seriously, how often do you perform maintenance on your own site/blog? Probably closer to never than often.

You link to other resources where people can find out more, or perhaps the source where you got your information. But as the web evolve, pages disappear or move, and the link you pasted in your entry 3 years ago doesn’t work any more.

But manually going through a pile of posts looking for broken links is not something you have time to do, and certainly not something you want to do.

The plugin gives you a quick overview of broken links.

That is where the automated link checking comes in. There’s a plugin out there for WordPress called “Broken Link Checker“, and what it does is that it goes through your entries and checks the links and images in it. And if it comes across links that are broken, it gives you an overview of those broken links, and some actions you can take, like unlinking it, from the WordPress admin panel, without having to go into each post and removing that broken link. You just click on “unlink” from the overview, and the plugin does the work for you.

An easy way to see the broken links.

When was the last time you did maintenance on your site/blog?