A survey of web sites and blogs a few years ago found that only about 1 in 100 visitors are motivated enough to leave comments (tip o’ the cap to ProBlogger for the link). On this blog, sadly, the ratio is even lower. For example, over the past month there were 2,453 visitors and just 13 posted comments (excluding comments by me). And more than half of those were on one controversial post defending the Kindle e-book reader. You can see them all on the blog’s page at Disqus. That’s a ratio of barely more than 1 comment per 200 visits, which I’d really like to improve.
So in addition to just saying, hey, comments are MOST WELCOME, I’ve also added Lester Chan’s WordPress plugin called WP-PostRatings. You can see now at the top bottom of every entry, just below the list of categories tags, as a rating of 1 to 5 stars. Any and every reader can click on the stars to dole out their own ratings. So please feel free to rate away.
It took a little bit of tinkering to figure out how to get the plugin working properly. Just uploading the code to my plugin directory and activating it on the WordPress plugin settings wasn’t enough. I had to also add a snippet of code to my index.php and post.php template files. It wasn’t totally obvious where to put the snippet in the files, which are customized already as part of the Mandigo theme. A quick email to Mandigo’s author, Tom Picard, received an equally quick and easy answer from Tom. he told me to put the PostRating snippet anywhere after the code:
<?php
while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
?>
I did and everything works great now. Thanks, Tom.
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