Good Blogging Manners

It is spring break. As is my habit for off-times, I go into my "summer schedule" here on the blog. (My subbing stories from last week will appear next week.) Wednesdays are for blogging minutiae. 

Since it is A to Z Challenge time, I thought I'd talk about commenting. Especially commenting as a return visit when someone new visits your blog. It is considered good manners, and most of the bloggers I encounter do engage in the practice. 

But there are times when I fall down on the job. That's when I can't find the blog of the commenter. 

These instructions are for Blogger. At some point I created a reader profile on WordPress, so when I comment there there's also a link. It seems to work... 

If you click on your name after you've commented on a Blogger blog, you'll get your profile page. Under "My Blogs" should be a link to your blog. 

My problems stem from when there is more than one blog listed. And/or that link goes to a blog that hasn't been updated in a long time. Or it goes to a landing page where the blog is not obvious. 

Sure, I could go to the A to Z Master List. Now. But in non-April times, or really now, as I don't have a lot of time to go blog searching, if I can't figure out where the blog is fairly easily, I won't return visit. (And I'll feel guilty for this, but at a certain point it's more trouble than it's worth.) 

If your profile works, there's a big "Edit Profile" button in the upper right hand corner. Making it clear which blog you want return visitors to find makes things so much simpler. 

But what if your profile doesn't work? What if the only way to you can comment is via "Anonymous"? 

(This happens. Sometimes it's a system glitch. Sometimes I can't get the right Google profile to load. And sometimes it's a problem I can't figure out, and who has time to mess with that, especially in April?)

This is where using some HTML in a comment is fine. 

I usually type something like "Liz A. from Laws of Gravity" as a signature. (If you've seen my "Some Basic HTML" post, you know how to do this.) I have this saved on "Notepad" on my Windows desktop so all I have to do is copy/paste if needed. 

And you can do that, too. 

In HTML, my signature looks like:

The highlighted parts are the important HTML that you'll need for your signature. Or:

You can omit the spaces. (I did it that way to make it stand out.) The red is what you'll replace with your information. (Sorry it's an image. I tried to get one of those boxes things that you can copy, but I couldn't make it work. At least, since it's an image, you can click on it to make it bigger.) 

If you add that to the end of all your comments, there's no question where you want return visits to go. 

I've been bad about this, though. I've been trusting that my links work. And they seem to? That's the problem, of course. If the links don't work, that's the blogger who isn't returning the visit. 

So, how about you? Are you getting return visits? Do you put in a blogging signature? Has anyone figured out how to not have to do an anonymous comment? 

Today's A to Z Challenge post brought to you by the letter...