All these questions, boy oh boy. Well to answer them, yes the Student Blogging Challenge has started as of last week. And while most my friends and classmates were dreading its arrival, I’m actually really excited to get started! Now you may be thinking “What about week 1?”, week 1 was technically last week, where we had to basically update our blogs if we had them, or for new students to set up a blog for themselves and learn all the cool tricks around blogging. If you go check out my about me and commenting guidelines pages, you’ll see they are now up to speed with my life and the changes that have happened in the past year.

Speaking of commenting, that is the topic of this post. I know I’ve said “Comment down below, let’s talk in the comments, give me feedback on how I did in the comments” countless times. But how do you actually leave a comment? Thats what I’m going to break down in this post. So without further ado, lets jump right in.

WHY?
Commenting on my posts helps me add or fix things that will help my blog and posts for the future! It gives me real human feedback, from someone other than me! For example, saying “I love the blog, but maybe add a link here or there to make it interactive” is very helpful towards me because next time I know my audience might get bored while reading, and to make it fun, interactive, and colourful.

HOW?

Here is were we break down the logistics of commenting. First, you need to scroll to the bottom of the post you want to comment on.

There is a whole place just designated for commenting, you can’t miss it trust me! It should look like this:

Next, obviously, type in your comment, feedback, or critique, and once your done your comment, there should be a space that looks like this:

Typing this in properly ensures the server that you are, in fact, a human trying to interact with another human, not just a robot. You cannot post your comment if this field is empty.

Your 75%of the way there! Now all you need to do is type in your first name and email. If you don’t want to use your first name, use your initials or even the first letter of your name, that will work! As for email, it can detect when you put in a fake email, so please put in a valid one. The blogging people don’t send you emails or harass you with notifications if you give them your email address, it is used again for authentication.

Last thing, is making sure you said what you want to say, correct any grammar and add whatever you want to add, and press post! That simple. The person receiving your comment will have to approve it, before they can reply, so make sure your comment is respectful towards the person receiving it!

WHAT SHOULD I SAY?

I touched on this in my commenting guideline page, so I shouldn’t have to say much. Also most of this part is pretty self-explanatory. Being respectful is important when commenting, because you have to make sure what you are saying doesn’t hurt the other persons feelings.

Heres an example of a comment I left on someone else’s blog post:

Positives & negatives! Always give the person at least one compliment when commenting, and then give your feedback! Structure your comment as if you were speaking to a formal figure, to make it more professional. Make sure you do these things, plus what I said on my Commenting Guidelines page and your all set for commenting!

Comment away!

USING HTML IN COMMENTS

Using coding in comments isn’t as hard as you think! It could be as simple as using a link, just like you do when your blogging. My friend, Gabe, left a comment on my blog, specifically about slideshows and how to use meta-sliders in blogs. So I re-searched a post about how to use meta-sliders in blogs, linked it in my comment and sent it away!

It looked like this:

~Malaika