responding to a comment within a comment

I frequently respond to a commentor within their comment. In WordPress, it’s super easy. There are other ways, but my favorite is the laziest way:

I view the comments on a post while logged into WordPress. In many templates, the word “edit” will appear next to each comment, along with the commentor’s name and the date of the comment. (click on the image below to see it more clearly)

I just click edit.

How do you edit comments on Blogger? It doesn’t look like you can. After a search, I found a Q&A that read like this:

Question: “Someone left a comment on my blog and they made a spelling mistake. I could care less. But they do I guess and want me to edit their comment to fix their spelling mistake is there any way I can do that?

Answer: Not native Blogger comments – with Blogger, you take them or leave them.

So in Blogger, it appears you have to just make your own comment on your post if you want to reply to a comment there. That’s also what I’ve seen Shannon do on Rocks in My Dryer and she’s on Typepad.

My “best practices” for responding to a comment within a comment? I italicize and indent my response, I place it in parenthesis and I add “by JSM” to differentiate the comment from the response. Save. Done.

This post was inspired by Elle at A Complete Thought. Thanks for the idea!