A few days ago I posted the question over at the BloggerLuv community, just to see if bloggers do indeed work as hard on their blogs as they did when they first started blogging.

Suffice to say there were some really good responses and it does seem that fellow bloggers are still working hard on their blogs and enjoying every moment of it, which is great to see, as with blogging you have to stick to it to make it work and the majority of bloggers that I know are hard workers, anyhoo here re just some of the answers I received:

• Peter Pelliccia Are you kidding, I blog harder now than when I first started, and I enjoy it a whole lot more too.
• Ms. Ileane Speaks In a perfect world it should be easier now than it was in the beginning!But I agree with Peter, I work harder now. As I learn more about blogging and social networking, I find there’s more to do! Before I learned how to get traffic through networking I would publish a post and be happy if I could convince my daughter and my friend Kissie to read it. So if I got 2 hits a day I was a happy camper!
• John Sullivan NO
  I still take 3 mins to write a post
  I don’t waste time doing what doesn’t work
  I don’t run around trying to make a bunch of fake friends and try to connect with people that don’t connect
  I try to look out for my friends
  It’s ALOT easier now
  I’m just as passionate just not as disillusioned like I was so that saves ALOT of time
  Don’t Chase GHOSTS
• HART I’m spending as much time as I did in the early years, but I feel I am more productive at least, in that most everything I do I try to make it HAVE A PURPOSE (#HART-Empire) in a long-term approach. I can’t remember the last time I did NOT see a “99″ on my stumble toolbar count .. I occasionally do stumble, but not from requests anymore as that was the biggest time waster for me.But .. am I a better blogger than before? Do I blog just as hard as I did before?5 out 7 days a week I don’t even feel I am a blogger at all actually .. and think that term will die out by the end of 2010.

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But don’t let it stop there, I’d love to hear your answer to the question, so please let us all know, Do you still blog as hard as you did the first day you started?

Why do you bother to use third party comment form if WordPress itself already offer the best comment form available?

This question has been my question for a long time. Yes, I do use intenseDebate in my telecommunication blog but it is because my telecommunication blog is in blogpost platform. You should already knew or even experienced how bad the blogspot comment form is. It is so bad which make me sure that many potential commentators drove away in blogspot blog if still use blogspot default comment form. That’s why I use IntenseDebate, an automatic product which offer WordPress like comment form for my telecommunication blog readers.

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First of all let’s remind ourselves of what exactly the term “Blog” is defined as:

Oh hang on; there isn’t really a worldwide definition of the term Blog.  Instead there is a culmination of different versions.  Wikipedia doesn’t even give a singular definition for this term, only that it is a derivative of the term “Web Log”.  Quite fitting really, it does almost sound like a journal, or a place where you can insert your personal comments.

I think that this is the most important thing to remember about a Blog, the fact that it is a personal entry, a log in your journal that stores some information on what you have learnt or maybe something that you wish to share.  There are no rules with how anyone runs their blogs, but more like unwritten guidelines.  If you don’t follow these guidelines then you should probably call your “Blog” something else.

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I’ve visited a few blogs since I started blogging and over the last year my blog has grown in popularity and it’s comments, but the question is:

Is there a right or wrong way to display comments?

For those who are not sure what I mean by displaying your comments on your blog I shall try to explain…

On a WordPress set up you have several options for your comments, one is that you can display your comments as the most recent comment at the top of the comments list or most recent at the bottom,  another option which is useful for Website SEO is the option to split comments over pages, for example imagine you’ve got 40 comments on one post, imaging how big that page would look! So you can spread the comments over so many pages and does it make a difference in the SEO of your blog and help with the loading time with Google.

So now it’s over to my readers ….

• Do you prefer to have the comments with the latest at the top or the bottom of the comment list?
• How many comments per page do you think is just enough?

It will be interesting to see everyone’s responses about this

You’ve probably seen them, hell, I even have them here on Blazing Minds, I’m talking about social network share buttons.

Nearly every blog you visit has them these days and though us bloggers do love to have them on our blogs for those kind enough to click on to share a bit of love and Stumble, ReTweet, Digg, Like ……….. and the list goes on.

As you will see, here on Blazing Minds I have the SexyBookmarks plugin at the bottom of the blog post where readers can share the post they are enjoying on a selection of sites for others to find and also share and though there is a choice there to choose from I was wondering what sites people use the most and which ones are worth having which are not.

So when you’ve finished reading this bloggy post, check out the buttons and use the ones you are listed with, then leave me a comment letting me know which ones you think you would remove, which ones you would like to see and why, then I can take a look to see what are more popular than others.

I have tried to add the popular ones that I use such as Twitter, BlogEngage, StumbleUpon, Digg, Ping.fm and so on, but I’d love my readers input

Image courtesy of Ethan Hein via flickr

Get paid to share your links!

The mighty CommentLuv plugin has now been updated to version 2.80 and it seems faster than the previous versions and also has some nice new features included in the latest incarnation.

Which I will list for you in a moment, but first let me mention the nice surprise I had from Andy from CommentLuv via Twitter, I was reading in my Twitter time line that the new version was listed in the WordPress Plugins Directory, which I have to admit I don’t visit that often, I use the search from within WordPress for updates etc. But, after receiving this tweet from Andy, I had to check it out!

Imagine my surprise and excitement when I saw the second image on the page, were my red headed avatar is in pride of place in a screenshot of how the plugin is displayed.

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The other day I posted about if you have a donate button on your blogand the comments have been very interesting, so I thought I would continue on the subject but this time with a different outlook on the debate of Donate Buttons.

So I’m going to ask you all something about the side of donating to Blazing Minds, if I was to give away one of our albums to download to each person that donates a minimum amount of say £2.99 would you be more likely to donate to the blog and support my music project? For example you can currently get one of the Remergence EPs for £2.99 you could get that if you wanted

Yes I know this is probably the same as buying an album, but, with a difference that you could decide on the amount you wish to donate it could be more if you so wish.

Then anyone who donates is actually getting a little something back, anyway, let me know what you all think and if it looks good I will update the donate button to something like “Donate to Blazing Minds and get an album download”