Supercharge your Blog Comments with Disqus

Ok, as we know, most Blog commenting systems suck, especially Blogger! However if you follow this simple guide your blog will be the envy of your friends and fellow bloggers.

In this guide we will introduce you to the Disqus commenting system which is probably the most popular 3rd party commenting system out there.. and it's VERY impressive.

Before we get into how to install etc, lets first look at the advantages that Disqus Provides.

Better Polls for your Site

A great way of adding some interactivity to a blog for your readers is that of asking poll questions. There are plenty of poll making sites out there, and even Blogger itself has it's own simple poll gadget. However if you're serious about your polls then you really need to check out PollDaddy. It's probably the de-facto standard of Polls around the blogsphere and some of the largest blogs on the net use it ... and best of all, it's free!

So lets take a quick look at Polldaddy and what you can do.

Adding a Stat Counter to your Blog

Like most bloggers it's always nice to know more about who is reading your site, where they come from and what they are reading etc. This post will show you how to add an excellent free statcounter to your site which will give you access to a large amount of useful information.

This should be sufficient for 90%+ of bloggers. However, if you later find yourself being in the envious position of getting 1000's of hits per day then you can always look at a more powerful solution such Google Analytics which I will write about later on.

Ok, so how do we get some stats on our blog? For the purposes of this How-To I'll be using the excellent free service from Statcounter and assume you have a Blogger blog, although the technique applies the same to almost all the Blogging services out there.