Friendly readers

We've been keeping busy posting work to our own blogs, but I'm hoping you all can begin to find some time to check out your classmates' pages and leave some brief but meaningful comments on their pieces.  You might not get to look at everyone's each day--I'm having a hard time keeping up myself but I do read all your pieces and enjoy doing so very much--but I encourage you to skip around, click on a few of the names in the sidebar of the class blog when we're in the lab and see what others are up to. 

Commenting, at this point at least, simply involves reading a work and offering positive (but sincere) feedback, mostly just to say you read it and made note of it. Friendly--like the sweet dolphin above--but with a porpoise.  I mean, purpose.  (Dolphin joke.) Some phrases you might use to get started:

• It's interesting...
• I was surprised...
• I noticed...
• I like...
• I wonder...
• You reminded me...
• We both...

Try to avoid just making silly or solely sociable comments that don't pertain to the writing or our work together.

Please try to skip around that everyone gets comments instead of just the posts close to the top. If you notice a piece hasn't been seen or doesn't have as many comments as others, please make an effort to offer feedback on those. If you have time to read and comment on your classmates' other posts, please feel free to do so.

You might have noticed when you post comments to your classmates' blogs that you have to type in a security word before your comment will show up. Most of the time it's a jumble of letters but sometimes it's a real word or phrase. This is mostly to prevent computers from leaving comments on your blog to promote a company's websites or other things like that, to ensure that an actual human is leaving you a comment.

I personally hadn't gotten many computer-generated spam comments on my own blog until lately.  I guess I don't really see it as a problem, and many people find it annoying to have to do this extra, seemingly pointless, step to leave a comment. If you'd like to disable the need to do this on your blog and make commenting faster and easier, just go to the Design link at the top of your page, click on the Settings tab, then Comments, then scroll down and click "no" on the "show word verification on comments?" section. You are, of course, welcome to make other changes or none at all.

I did read an interesting article about sometimes when you're given a word to verify in a situation like this that it's actually one from an old or even ancient text that scholars are trying to translate. Take a look at the story...fascinating.  I've been noticing a lot of numbers in the word verifications for our blogs, like pictures taken of address signs on buildings and houses, it looks like.  This leads me think that we are doing deciphering work for Google Maps or something...

As you finish making up your missing posts and doing the new work for this week, take some time to visit your classmates' blogs and let them know you've noticed what they're putting out there.  I've been seeing lots of good stuff...