I just installed two new Wordpress plugins that should make commenting a little easier for you folks (and for me).

One is a live comment preview. This will allow you to see a little almost real-time preview of what your comment is going to look like. Theoretically, this will help you see how your formatting will appear before you hit submit.

And as for formatting, I also added a comment quicktags bar above the comments. If you’re not an HTML wiz, or you don’t like to type out your tags all the time, now you can easily add in some basic formatting: bold, italic, blockquote, and link. They are very simple to use. All you have to do is select the text you want to put a tag around, and then click on the corresponding button, and presto! Please use this to beautify your formatting - especially when you’re quoting me or other commenters. It makes for a lot easier reading.

I’m also going to be adding a “recent comments” list into the sidebar soon (maybe tonight). But I have yet to find a plugin that does this trick as simply and easily as I am looking for. I basically just want one that says the name of the commenter and the name of the post, and is really easy to format, and to modify how many items are being shown on the list. Surprisingly, most of these are more complex. I might be okay using one that’s more complex if you can make a good case for it though.

Let me know if you have any trouble with any of the plugins!

UPDATE!

I also added a plugin called “time2read” which displays an estimated average read time for each post. To install that on your site, scroll down on that page for English instructions. It’s real simple.

I’ve also installed “Get-Recent-Comments” which is a simple and nicely customizable plug-in that pulls up your most recent comments. It also has a nice feature where you can edit the functionality either through inserting arguments into a PHP function, or by going through your Wordpress control panel. I have it set right now to display the ten most recent, but maybe I’ll increase that.