I just spent a few minutes, or fifteen, trying to figure out how to get a better look at link backs to my blog into my reader. A link back lets a blogger know when someone else has found their blog content useful enough to include a "link back to" their own post.For Example
I wrote a post about the 31 Day Comment Challenge ending on May 31. Vicki Davis kindly included a link back to that post. I knew about it for two reasons: first, she mentioned in her comment on that post that she was planning on including a link to the post; second, it got picked up via Technorati. You might want to read Sue Waters' blog post "Why Does Technorati Mock Me" for some insight into that website. There is another example of a link back. I'm sending you over to Sue's blog rather than reinventing the wheel.
Why I Started Down This Path
My original intention was to go to my reader and see what was being blogged in respect to NECC onsite reflections. When I opened my reader, I noticed that I had some comments to my blog. A while back, Cathy Nelson was bemoaning the fact that she couldn't subscribe to comments from the School Library Journal and many bloggers in her reader. I ended up following a comment from Vicki Davis to her blog to copy and paste the code to display my comments in an RSS feed. That was trick in itself.
How To: Comment RSS in Blogger
I ended up going to my Layout tab. I added a Page Element and titled it Subscribe. Gave it a name: My Feed for Comments and pasted in this code: http://njtechteacher.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/ that I copied from Vicki's comment subscription button. Of course, I needed to change coolcatteacher to njtechteacher.
How About Link Backs?
Between writing this post and the initial fifteen minutes of searching, it comes down to this: Blogger has a bullet item at the bottom of the help on link backs that gives the following instructions:
- Go to the Google Blog Search website
- Type link:your-blog-here.blogspot.com in the search box replacing your-blog-here with your blog id (such as njtechteacher)
- You can then copy and paste the url directly intro your reader.
Now back to my regularly scheduled initial plan ... reading NECC reflections.
Image Citation:
Desirae. "Liquid Links." ~Dezz~'s photostream. 2008 Jun 7. 2008 Jul 1.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3016/2560241604_d4f1ce17e5.jpg?v=0
The other way you can create the comment feed is to take the comment URL and burn a feed using Feedburner - which means you then know your number of subscribers.
ReplyDeleteThanks for linking to my post. Technorati still mocks me and here is my latest post on it.
Sue:
ReplyDeleteI made my blog feed through Feedburner, and get my subscriber account that way. Do you think there is a benefit to having Feedburner keeping track of the comments and having two different subscriber counts, or would they end up the same? I wonder.
I look forward to reading your latest Technorati related post.
Ann
Sorry for late response but for some reason my comment tracking services have had a bit of an issue getting the feeds :( . I don't think that your numbers for subscribers for comment feeds and posts feeds will be the same. Most people tend to only subscribe to posts. From what I have seen it is only a small number of people who like to subscribe to comments.
ReplyDelete