How To Highlight Your Comments In Blogger

Unlike Wordpress, Blogger doesn't let you reply directly to other people's comments in the comments section. This is a serious bummer. If the blogger gods are reading this now - PLEASE ADD THIS FEATURE PRONTO!! If you use Wordpress, you may take this opportunity to gloat about the superiority of your blogging platform and ignore this entire post...

For the rest of us who are on blogger, this post is for you.

There are actually comment systems out there that you can add to your blogger blog - like intensedebate and disqus - that will let you reply to comments directly. I thought about adding one to my blog when I did my redesign - I see them used in a lot of places successfully - but ultimately decided not to. Since I can't reply to people's comments directly though, I thought it would be nice to at least be able to highlight my comments so people could easily see them.



To do this, I used this how-to at Frou-FruGal. It's super super easy to follow. It does involve adding some HTML code, but it's not hard or scary to do. If you're thinking about trying it out, I say go for it 100%. Frou-FruGal's tutorial gets two giant thumbs up from me.

I did a lot of Googling to figure out how to do this, and this is by no means the only way to get the job done. There are a number of different ways to highlight your comments. I settled on this particular way for a couple reasons though:

(1) You can change the colors really easily (without going back into HTML hell) and
(2) It didn't involve ripping out my hair because I thought I was going to irreparably harm my blog template (that I just worked so hard on!)

A lot of other tutorials that I found made you add your chosen colors to the HTML hell that is your blog template. I knew that once I put the code in there, I would never be able to find it again and, therefore, I wouldn't be able to change the colors if I didn't like them. I also knew that I like to play around with different colors and options a lot before I settle on something (remember this post?), so being able to switch the colors easily was a must.



Frou-FruGal's tutorial lets you add your colors in CSS code, which you can find quickly and easily in your blogger template designer. Once you add the HTML code, you can easily change the single line of CSS code to your heart's content, as many times as you want. All without trying to find the one single line of code you need in an ocean of thousands of lines of HTML coding.



The whole process didn't take me very long. Honestly, the hardest part was settling on what colors to use. You can also play with the border thickness if you like. And if you ever get sick of having your comments highlighted, you can make everything white again like you never did it in the first place.

Great stuff.