Enabling comments on web sites

One of the things about web sites is that you're not really sure if people like the info you're providing or not. Blogs are great for that, because blogs allow comments. People can leave a comment to say if they like what you said, hate it, or whatever.

When my wife and I started our recipe web site, Healthy Recipes For Your Family, one of the things that we wanted was to allow comments. But standard web sites don't allow comments. We could have used Wordpress to build the site and use Wordrpess' built in commenting feature, but I wanted to give Site Built It a try with the web site.

I'm glad I did, because SBI provides a great infrastructure for getting people to your page. Without doing much extra at all, our recipe site ranks well in search engines so that we're getting people visiting the site.

But SBI doesn't provide for comments on web pages. Enter Disqus, a free service that allows visitors to put comments on your web pages. It's a pretty full featured service, and works well. You can see a sample of a comment on our vegetable lasagna recipe. And it's comments like that that make the whole chore of putting up a web site worth the while.

So if you have a straight web site that doesn't allow comments, take a look at Disqus.

Cool Anime Related Contest

If you're into anime, I ran across a contest with a cool looking prize. You can win an autographed Ouran High wall scroll by just leaving a comment on the post linked to above, which is easy enough. You'll be contacted by email if you win.

For my students who are doing the blogging part of Intro to Computing, that's an easy way to get credit for one of the blog comments, and possibly win a prize, too!