Getting the Most Out of Your Comment Replies with Thesis

Comments are awe­some. For many blog­gers, it is the read­ers’ feed­back which makes blog­ging all the more worthwhile.

I could not agree more — it’s a good deal of fun when blog entries become full-blown conversations!

When that hap­pens, though, you’re going to find your­self reply­ing to com­ments… a lot. And while that’s def­i­nitely not a bad thing, what hap­pens when there are more than one com­ment to reply to? What hap­pens when you revisit your blog after a day and your most recent block­buster post has dozens of responses to which you want to reply?

How do you go about doing that? Do you take the Twit­ter approach, pref­ac­ing the name of each per­son you’re reply­ing to with an “@”?

@Aldrin — Quite right!

Or maybe your approach is sim­pler, more elegant:

Arm­strong: Thanks for your com­ment, and thanks for visiting!

What­ever you use, you want some­thing that’s going to look good and set your responses apart from the pack. Address­ing your com­menters by name is a great way to let them know that you’re pay­ing atten­tion to them; shouldn’t you let them know with style?

Using the The­sis theme frame­work for Word­Press, you can!

The­sis, the mag­num opus of Word­Press theme designer Chris Pear­son, pro­vides a very sim­ple (sim­pler with a plu­gin, as explained later) way to address your com­menters by name with style, all the while pro­vid­ing a link ref­er­ence back to the com­ment you’re reply­ing to.

Increase acces­si­bil­ity?

Increase style?

Can be used by blog author and in-the-know commenters?

The­sis for the Win!

So what’s the method?

See for yourself:

[pre][code]<a class=“comment_link” href=”#comment-1969″>Conrad</a>: Thanks for vis­it­ing, Captain![/code][/pre]

The result?

Con­rad: Thanks for vis­it­ing, Captain!

Beau­ti­ful. Ele­gant. And a link to instantly refer back to the orig­i­nal comment!

But… that’s a lot to remem­ber, isn’t it? And typ­ing all that in every time? Yeah, I know, it can be a bit of a chore. So I com­mend to you Ozh’ Absolute Com­ments.

Absolute Com­ments is a handy plu­gin which allows blog admin­is­tra­tors to reply to com­ments directly from the admin­is­tra­tion panel. That’s a huge time-saver on its own, but the plu­gin also allows you to setup a tem­plate with which all of your quick replies will be populated.

In the Set­tings -> Absolute Com­ments panel of your admin­is­tra­tion area — assum­ing, of course, the Absolute Com­ments plu­gin is active — use this bit of code in the “Reply Pre­fill” field to make tak­ing advan­tage of rockin’ Thesis-powered replies both quicker and easier:

<a href='%%link%%' class='comment_link'>%%name%%</a>: 

Take your replies to the next level! If you’ve found this use­ful, sub­scribe to my syn­di­ca­tion feed or fol­low me on Twit­ter!

Dis­claimer: I work for Chris Pear­son & DIYthemes, pro­vid­ing sup­port in var­i­ous ways for the The­sis theme framework.