Leaving comments on blogs

Several friends have told me that it is not obvious how to post comments to a blog. It is a bit weird, and the design of the form is poor. So here are the instructions.

Press the little comment text under a posting and a small pop up window opens. This window cannot be resized (at least not under Internet Explorer). You put the text of your comment into the box. Then you need to scroll down. You are asked for some identification and you have choices. You can put your own blogger id in the email and password combination, but that isn't something most would probably want to do. You can also post anonymously by checking the anonymous button. The other choice is to press the "nickname" button, and put your nickname in there. That should not be an email address or anything that is directly traceable back to you, but is likely to be known by me or the small community of folks reading this. So for example, Madame comments under that name or occasionally as Mme.

You are also asked to enter a security string. This is a collection of characters (sometimes numbers too) that are displayed on the screen in a way that can easily be read by people, and are hard to read by machines. By entering that string of characters, you are essentially saying, "This is a human entering the information, not a bot". Try it and see.