Better recent comments
"Recent comments" are an essential addition to the sidebar of just about every blog. They tell your visitors that they're important, and I know from experience that many people will come back to your blog to read new comments, even if there are no new posts. If you're blogging for business, they tell your customers that you trust and respect them enough to let them leave feedback right there on your website, for everyone else to read.
The easiest way to get comments into your blog's sidebar is the inbuilt widget in WordPress. But the problem with the widget is that the formatting is completely fixed: the commenter's name links back to their website, and the post title links to their comment. This has the potential to be confusing: people click expecting to read the comment and get sent off to a totally different site. And personally I'd rather keep people on my own blog a little bit longer.
So a better way to display recent comments is with Krischan Jodies' Get Recent Comments plugin, which lets you formulate comments links any way you like. The plugin's default setting is what I currently have in the sidebar: name links to the comment, and there's an extract of what was said to follow. This seems nice and simple and straightforward to me; there are no outside links to distract people, and I don't get my post titles repeated over and over; the unique content that is each comment actually shows in the sidebar. If that's what you want, then having installed the plugin, you can just enable the widget as normal.
If you want to change things, there's a plugin settings page where you can do that:
You have the option to exclude your own comments (though I wouldn't use this: having your own comments display does show that you respond to what other people say), and to use a huge list of tags to ensure that comments display exactly the way you want them. I'm rather liking the Gravatar support; you could create a rather nice MyBlogLog-like bar showing the pictures of the people who are talking on your blog.
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