Conversing in the blogosphere is an art form. Sometimes, I feel as if I'm at a huge party, and there are clusters of fascinating, nattily dressed people filling the multi-leveled hip club, with music thumping and lights flashing, and I'm running (in my sensible tennis shoes) from one cool conversation to the next. I'm running because, instead of talking about Spice Girl's baby, these people are talking books, and writing, and art. (The Eternal Conversation, right?)
At first, I tried to handle my rounds alone. Then I hired the much younger----but with such cute glasses!---Mr. Google Reader to assist me. Great! Now I could follow multiple conversations at once. The only problem was that (and here the party gets weird) if I actually spoke during one of these conversations, instead of just sagely nodding at the fringes, then I had to keep dashing back to that group of people to see if anyone had replied. Which was often days later. (How I would love to hear Dorothy Parker handle this kind of conversational time travel.)
A breakthrough occurred when I discovered I could subscribe to all comments as well as all original posts. (And just so you know, you can do that for the conversations here by clicking on the link "Subscribe to all comments" at the right.) And joy! joy! some blogs even offered to tap me on the shoulder only when a particularly scintillating conversation had new thoughts. (That would be found here by clicking on the title of a post, and then scrolling to the bottom for the link marked "Subscribe to: post comments.")
And here's where I need your help: I can't find these links for some of the wildly wonderful, totally fascinating, non-probation anklet conversations I want to follow. Is this not available in some blogging software? Or is it an option the blogger turns on or off? Please, I'm begging you, enlighten me. Because I really want to ditch my sensible tennies and slip on my three-inch bronze snakeskin heels.
I wish I could help, but please enlighten us all if you find out. I don't even understand the basic RSS feed, or, uh, whatever it's called. Slinking away, 'cause I'm just always lost on how to keep up. I'm sure it's easy or, uh, something.
ReplyDelete:)
I subscribe to all the comments from your blog, anyway, jules. Because, you know, some of them are out of my big mouth. :0
ReplyDeleteBut there is no way that I can do that everywhere! What I want is to be able to leave a comment, and then see if the blogger replies to me, or if other people leave related comments. So we can all have a little lively conversation...
I have no idea. I use the Blogger template but I publish to ftp... I have a weird feeling that function is disabled.
ReplyDeleteThat's what we call a guess, though.
Unless they've turned it off deliberately, most people have feeds, according to Himself. He says to check http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default
ReplyDeletehttp://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default (filling in the name of the actual blogname, of course) and it should ask you where you want to put the feeds that are hiding.
I sure hope this helps, ask questions if it doesn't.
Thanks, TadMack...I'll try that! But why would people want to hide their feeds? Everyone: come out, come out, wherever you are!
ReplyDeleteAnd I think because Blogger allows you to put each post on a separate html page, that's why you can subscribe to only the comments for that post. Maybe other software doesn't allow this.