I’ve just added a new WordPress plugin to my sites that I think will help drive more comments on the site, and also give me more visibility of what readers are saying about my posts on other sites.
The BackType Connect plugin adds comments made on other blogs, Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg and Reddit to your site i.e. conversations occuring about your posts that were previously ‘invisible’ to readers will become visible, allowing readers to read and reply to them. Comment #5 on this post shows this in action.
The plugin was very easy to install and comfigure. The comments are shown inline and even work with threaded blogs. I did change a few of the default options though:
- ‘Comments summary’ - I turned off as this links to an external page, rather than an internal page
- ‘Link to more comments’ – I turned this off as currently it links through to the BackType site rather than to the readers blog. I’d rather this worked like the commentluv plugin where users get the link benefit not BackType
- ‘Ignore retweets’ - I’ve turned this on as I think showing a post has been retweeted is a good thing
The plugin didn’t work well with the Twitter Tools plugin I’m using to add my new posts automatically to my twitter page, and added my tweets to every post. I managed to fix this by adding my twitter profile url to the WordPress spam moderation filter i.e. http://twitter.com/EvertonBlair
More: BackType Connect
