One of my favorite things about blogging is talking to you. For real. I've made so many friends this way. And the day I can't respond to my comments the way I like to will be a very sad day for me. In an effort to ward off that day as long as possible, I built an admin page for myself to make managing comments easier.
The page lists all the comments that have been left on my blog that need to be approved (your first comment has to be approved ... after you have one approved comment the rest automatically show up) AND lists all the comments that I haven't replied to yet.
Last night I finally caught up with all the comments that were left in June. Gah! I have a hundred + more to go through. For sanity's sake, I only show the most recent 100 on the admin page. Truth be told, I'm not replying to EVERY comment because after more than a month, it gets a little creepy to reply, but I know there are questions and such hidden in all those neglected comments that should be answered, so I'm going to go through them all, eventually.
In this screen shot, all the comments you can see have been approved already (that's the first, disabled checkbox). Then I have "ANSWER ME" and "DELETE ME" check boxes. I can check any of the boxes for a bunch of comments and click the "Save Changes" button to save everything at once.
Super handy for those days I wake up and "low interest rate loans" has commented on my blog 20 times ... which is about three times a week. I don't know why they keep doing it, because they don't get approved and they never show up on my website. Perhaps they think I'll get tricked into getting a loan? Who the hell knows. I used to have to delete each of these individually on my Edit Comment page, or log into my database and delete them in bulk there. This is so much better!
A while back I built myself fancy comment reply functionality. I can reply to your comment *within* the comments and (1) the reply gets emailed to you automatically, and (2) the comment shows up under your comment in the comment section as an answer to you. When I do this, your comment gets marked as "is answered." But since not all comments require a reply, on this page I can check the "ANSWER ME" box. The comment then gets marked as "is answered" and comes off the list.
I've had a pencil-drawn mock up of this page for ... a long time. I'm so happy to have it completed finally. :) It really is helpful. Before I managed my comments by keeping unanswered comments in an email box, but then I'd have to be at home to answer comments. Now I can log into my admin from anywhere and say hi to you!
In the list I also have links to edit the individual comment, edit the post the comment is for, visit the post the comment is for, and visit your website. It's my comment command center! Is there anything it's missing? If you have any good ideas for functionality? Are you even still reading the WORDY, NERDY post?