---
title: "My 5 Pet Peeves with Reading Blogs (mostly surrounding comments and feeds)"
date: 2008-03-09
description: "$( document ).ready(function() { // Handler for .ready() called. $("
canonical_url: https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/03/09/my-5-pet-peeves-about-blogs-mostly-surrounding-comments-and-feeds/
---
# My 5 Pet Peeves with Reading Blogs (mostly surrounding comments and feeds)
### 1. No email notification for follow-up comments.

When I leave a comment on a blog, I want to be notified if the author replies. About 70% of the blogs I read lack this feature. If you use WordPress, you can incorporate this feature through the [Subscribe to Comments](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/) plugin. I'm not sure how to do it Blogger, but I have seen it done (see the following image).

![blogger.png](https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com/idbwmedia.com/images/blogger1.png)

Without this follow-up, I have to periodically revisit your blog to see if you've responded. Since comments I leave are often sporadic and added quickly, chances are I won't remember that I even made a comment. Without this feature, blogs become less of a conversation and more like a guest book that I'm signing. (Blogflux has a service called [Commentful](http://commentful.blogflux.com/) that helps track updates to a site, but it's a lot of effort to add blogs to watchlists.)

The only disadvantage to follow-up comments in spam. If spammers get through and I'm subscribed, I may get some spam emails. I once set my wife's blog up with the Subscribe to Comments plugin, and when she started getting spam comments, she was horrified to learn that the previous commenters automatically received the spam comments. Still, with good anti-spam tools like Akismet, this isn't such a concern.

### 2. No ability to add my own blog link in the comment ID *and *be notified of follow-up.

In the above image, if I select the *Email follow-up comments* option, I'm forced to select my Google/Blogger identity. Since I don't use Blogger, it shows [my minimalist identity](https://www.blogger.com/profile/02783625657814739019). As you can see, there's not much there except a link to my real blog.

If I select the *Name/URL* option, I can customize my name and URL in the comment ID, but can't receive follow-up comments. Drats!

To add to the confusion, when I select the *Email follow-up comments* option, the first thing Google sends me is my own comment. Uhm, does [Google](https://googleblog.blogspot.com/) know what the word "follow-up" means?

### 3. Truncated post in my feed.

If you use a "read more" tag with your post, often the full post doesn't come through in the feedreader -- just the excerpt. This can really be tough for people like me who [read feeds on a Blackberry](https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/02/27/how-my-blackberry-may-benefit-you/).

You can get around this truncated feed problem in WordPress by using the [Full Text Feed plugin](http://cavemonkey50.com/code/full-feed/) (I'm happy to hear this plugin won't be needed in WordPress 2.5). If you're using another blogging platform, I'm not sure how to get the full feed in the feedreader.

Usually I just skip over truncated feeds because it takes about 10-15 seconds to load the original article on a BlackBerry. Sorry. That's my [passive aggressive response](https://idratherbewriting.com/2008/03/08/deciding-when-to-speak-up-and-when-to-shut-up/), because typing a reason as to why I'm not loading your original post takes too long and is impossible to do without loading the original post (which would defeat my point).

It feels good to vent. These pet peeves have really been frustrating me lately, and they are especially common on Blogger blogs. I have a couple of more pet peeves, so I'm getting them off my chest now.