I really got into poetry in high school, and I would constantly write about everything. I have a notebook full of poems, and they just sit. So I finally got a website to publish them on and I am opening it up to everyone. I am too much about community to want to make a blog where only I publish in. By doing that, so many great people and articles aren’t included.

Do you have old poetry laying around with no where to share it? Submit it to my newest poetry blog, and you can have your poems published there. Of course you will have credit for it, and a link to your website if you like. Even if you submit a poem you enjoy I will give you a link.

Currently I have several of my poems published there, with many more to come. I hope to be update the website daily with my poems, your poems, famous poems, and really great quotes.

Check out the About section for a little more details, and please tell me what you think. This is the first wordpress blog I really made all by myself, by installing a theme, editing the code, and installing the plugins.

Please leave me a comment here or at Words of a Poet and tell me what you think

A blog comes alive when the readers get a sense of community and take part in discussions. Thoughtful comments become a value-added proposition for everyone involved in the discussion. Or sometimes commenting can just be fun like the Comment Friday here at BAYB.

As a blog author, you should do everything you can do to encourage your readers to comment and provide means to make that easier for them to comment and follow the discussions. Today I will talk about a few WordPress plugins that will make it easy for you to achieve this objective.

1. Subscribe to Comments: I think this is arguably the most important comment plugin you can have in your blog. With a little checkbox option at the bottom of the comment box, it encourages users to receive email notifications of further comments. Your readers will love you for this simple but powerful community building feature. I know this might spark a debate, but I recommend leaving this unchecked and letting the user make the decision to subscribe.
2. WP Ajax Edit Comments: We have all made typos in the comments we leave. Be kind to your readers and give them the power to edit their own comments for a time specified by you. Your readers will surely appreciate this. Plus, the edit interface is inline without a page reload and very slick showing a countdown timer.
3. Live Comment Preview: As the name implies, you can preview your comment live as you type. Very useful to avoid typos and to make sure the URL you are linking will appear like you want to. The installation is very simple and works well out of the box.
   
4. Better Comments Manager: Are you going to every comment in your blog to post a reply? Imagine the time you could save if you could view, edit and reply to all your comments from one place, the admin panel. This plugin does that as well as lets you view comments by post in the admin panel. Your readers won’t see this but you will thank yourself.
5. Show Top Commentators: Reward your top commentators by linking to their blog and showing their name with the number of comments. This will encourage the top commentators as well as others to participate in the discussions.

I would love to hear about any other comment plugin that you use in your blog. Also, if you have any questions about installing these plugins, feel free to comment here. I will try to help out and I am sure so will others if they can.

I write about more technology related topics at ShanKri-la – where technology meets daily life!. My goal is to make your life on the Internet a little bit easier, a little bit manageable and a little bit more enjoyable.

Comment Friday received a great response, thank you to everyone who participated. This week we received 36 comments! All of them were really great, and gave an insight to how each blogger gets traffic to their blog. If you are a newer blogger, or just looking for more website traffic, I would definitely suggest reading the comments.

Many of the social networks were accounted for with Stumbleupon being most frequent. Of course google was definitely on the list. We are even seeing more google traffic. It was interesting to see that not many people said paid advertising or sponsored post purchases were factored in. I also didn’t see any contests mentioned.

After reading through all of the comments, it was definitely tough to chose a winner. However, I did decide on picking Sheila as our winner. Her post stood out, mostly by mentioning that it was her first comment friday, and that I had seen her name posting leaving comments before. She also left a pretty detailed explanation of what is getting her the most traffic, and how.

Make sure to stop by next friday when I will chose a new winner. If you have any topic ideas please leave me a comment.

To really be able to connect with your readers you have to be easy to contact. Not only that, but it easier for readers to ask questions, inquire about articles, and most importantly advertising terms can be made. We receive several contact form emails a week, without our contact page, I’m afraid that number would definitely suffer.

I am not very plugin competent, but even I could install the contact form. I found that the easiest contact form is the Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form.

The steps are pretty straightforward. Just as any plugin you should download it, unzip it, and upload the file in a FTP program (I use filezilla) into your wp-content/plugins section. After you activate the plugin you are ready to set it up and configure it.

From there you need to the contact form page and select Configuration. Enter your email and other information, but you can’t enter the URL yet because it’s not created.

The next step obviously is to create the Contact Form URL. To do so go to “write” like you were going to create a new post. Then you must click “pages”. Enter in the title of what you want the Contact Form to be named. Ours is named Contact Us. After you enter the title make sure to save it. You won’t have any actual text within the page yet.

Now go back to the Configuration page and add the Url of your new page. After that, go back to your Contact page and enter the code

“<!–gb_contact_form–>”

From there you are pretty much finished unless you want to further customize your contact form.

One problem I ran into however was that I use multiple blogs with that contact plugin. Therefore I had to have two separate emails. I couldn’t use the same email for two different contact forms.

Comment Friday is up on time this week! Hooray for that!

Since we have quite a few new readers let me tell you what Comment Friday is.

Comment Friday is a fun and simple idea. Just leave us a comment about the topic I mention, or really anything you want. From there we can get a great discussion going.

Each week we will chose one lucky commenter to be featured as our Blog of the Week and that blogger will get a permanent link to their blog in a post and a spot on our blog roll for the week.

Sound good? Those are the stakes and here is the topic. This week I am interested in hearing about what brings you the most traffic. Blog about your Blog has been trying to find ways to increase website traffic and I want to see what works for you.

Have something else on your mind? We want to hear that too!

The Prize Blog has chosen Blog about your Blog as their second day winner.

The prize is a Phillips 512MB MP3 Player. I was pretty happy to find out we are the winner, because what it means is we will have yet another great prize to reward our valuable and loyal readers with. Am I sucking up too much?

It’s not too late to win!

The Prize Blog is giving away even more prizes. You can still enter to win! There are 3 more days of prizes left. You can win a review of your website or a listing at the Bloggeries Blog Directory.

It’s easy to win all you have to do is subscribe to the rss feed, add the prize blog to your technorati faves, stumble the post, or link to the competition.

I wonder if this counts as another entry?

Do you have the best blog?

I know we do, thats why I nominated our blog for the best blog. The blankest blank is running an ongoing competition where you get to vote for your favorite blogs. Guess what? Out of over 70 submitted blogs, Blog about your Blog ranks 2nd!

A Familiar Face

The blankest blank is Bobby Griffin’s, owner of bestest blog of all-time, newest project. Many bloggers were active on his blog, and it grew to be a huge community. He is sticking to his roots and is working on his newest website, with the same theme.

Free Traffic Included

If you are familiar with the bestest blog of all-time you may also remember his very popular “next blog” button.

Blankest Blank is pretty similiar, each person has to visit your blog to give you a ranking of how good they think your blog is.

So far this month we have received about 180 visitors from the blankest blank. Not a huge surge of traffic, but definitely worth it for free. Not only the traffic, but we have received links from The Bestest Blog for being a top ranking blog.

Where does Blog about your Blog rank?

As I mentioned before, Blog about your Blog has held the rank of 2nd for a while now. We are receiving an average vote of about 3 out of 5, which I think it pretty good. I would love to see us take first, but it is definitely an honor just being so well ranked among the other blogs submitted. Shoe Money, Critique My Blog, and Boing Boing just to name a few.

Do you think your blog is best? Why not submit it and see. Make sure to register and vote for us! Give us a 5 and leave us a comment?