One easy method to encourage visitors to comment and hopefully improve traffic to your Blogger (Blogspot) blog is to add a recent comments feed to your site. It only takes a couple of minutes to carry out this procedure and is easy since it requires no editing of your Blogger template. This tutorial assumes limited technical knowledge of Blogger and is mostly aimed at new bloggers and beginners although it is suitable for any Blogspot blogger looking to increase action on their site.
If you would like to add a Recent Posts Feed to your Blogger website please refer to my earlier article Add a Recent Posts Feed to a Blogger Blog
Below I will take you through the steps of adding a widget to your blog's sidebar so that your comments feed will be displayed there. Unfortunately the maximum number of items that can be displayed in the feed at this point is limited to 5 due to a Blogger limitation. I have not found a hack to increase this level but when I do I will update this post.
Add a Recent Comments Feed to the Sidebar of a Blogger Blog
1. Login to you Blogger blog and navigate to Layout > Page Elements
2. Click on Add a Gadget in the sidebar and select the Feed widget
3. A popup dialog box will appear requesting you to configure the URL of your feed. Enter the following text into the box:
http://yoursitename.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/defaultBe sure to substitute yoursitename with the name of your site
4. If you have entered the address of your comments feed correctly Blogger will retrieve your feed and display a preview in a dialog box. The feed will include links to the last five comments made on your site.
5. Delete the name of your blog and type in Recent Comments instead
6. Click on Save
7. Click on View Blog to see your new Recent Comments feed in action.
8. If you want to change where it appears in the sidebar this can be achieved by returning to Layout > Page Elements and using drag and drop to position the widget into the spot of your choice.
Troubleshooting
If you are using a feed delivery service like FeedBurner the default comment feed URL will be being redirected by Blogger.com. In this case you will need to enter the Feedburner address of the feed which is likely to be something like this:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/Comments/YourSiteNameNotice how Feedburner capitalizes your blog name. Check the exact address at Feedburner if you are not sure of the feed address. For more on burning your feed at Feedburner check out these articles: Blogger RSS Feeds and Feedburner and Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner and Add a Feedburner FeedFlare to a Blogger Feed
This tutorial demonstrates how easy it is to add a recent comments feed to your Blogger (Blogspot) blog so that it can be displayed in a widget in the sidebar of your Blogger blog.
Related Articles
Add a Recent Posts Feed to a Blogger Blog
Blogger RSS Feeds and Feedburner
Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner
Add a Feedburner FeedFlare to a Blogger Feed
7 comments:
nice instructions
Great to hear you found these instructions to add recent comments feed to your blog useful
I tried this but wasn't able to get it to work. When I entered my blog URL, it said "Invalid Feed URL." My blog isn't public, it's only open to six authors. Would this make a difference? If it isn't public is it still possible to get a sidebar feature to work to list recent comments?
Help! Thank you.
I'm not sure whether my comment was received as it didn't show up (perhaps needs to be moderated). If not rec'd , please let me know. Thank you.
Hello Allyson. The above suggestion relies on accessing your blog's feed and if this is not available for some reason then this recent comments gadget won't work.
Have you tried to add the new Blogger recent comments gadget which you will find under the featured and most popular sections in Blogger gadgets? If you get this message: "An error occured fetching the feed data" then you will know that your feed is not available.
I have been doing a little bit of research into this issue on your behalf. What I have discovered is that there seems to be an issue accessing the feed for older blogs. For instance I have a private blog which I have been running for 18 months and cannot use the above tweak on it however I ran a new test blog to try it out and could install both types of comments gadgets regardless of the privacy setting. So I have concluded that for blogs around a year older or more this may be an issue. How old is your blog?
Making side bar in our blog is so helpful to give content to other people.We can show that how much post we had been make n this blog.Int his way by adding comment and recent post bar we can know people that what other people thinking in recent and what we have added new in the blog.
r4i karte
Great Andrew. Happy to help
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