How To Search for Comments in Blogger
Recently I was beset with a problem trying to find an old comment on my blog, but I was stonewalled because there doesn’t seem to be any such feature for Blogger. I can only search posts.
I thought I would check the Help section and Google Groups but I found no answer there either. So I put my thinking cap and came up with two solutions:
1. Why not backup your entire blog and then search it on your hard drive?
2. Or how about setting up Blogger to automatically email you the comments so that you will have a copy in your email client?
Those are two solutions that I came up with. Am I missing something here or is there a better way that has somehow eluded me?
UPDATE: Read this for an even better way to search for comments!
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I use a recent comments widget from Beautiful Beta, and when I am looking for an old comment I change the code of the widget to display a lot of comments (20-30) and then check through them. This is a pretty crude way to find old comments, and I don’t know if there is a limit to how many can be pulled.
Why on Earth, I wonder, does Blogger not give readers an option to subscribe to comments? That would be an easy workaround.
I have Blogger e-mail me all comments, so I can check them that way, but that is an unnecessarily clunky way to check old comments.
Thanks for the tip Jason, and clunky is right. I wholeheartedly agree about Blogger missing the boat with this one. We should all send them a request for this feature.
I back up periodically, but as for finding comments, I have always done your #2 and it works fine. Unfortunately with Typepad they send graphics too so the emails are around 17k as opposed to Bloggers 1k.
blog bloke,
How about a quick check on this one?
http://blog.Blog Bloke.com/feeds/comments/full?max-results=999
You may also find the info on:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html
Hey, that’s a neat trick! Thanks.
The problem is it is a little hard to read. And I should also add that when you download the file be sure to add an .html extension to it.
Oops. I probably forgot the most important matter: not everybody use the same browser, Firefox, like me. Firefox has a built-in RSS reader so no pop-up would come out if you open the feed RSS.
Anyway, just provide some info.
You could try the same method as I use for adding categories to my Blogger blog(classic template) and use Google’s Blog Search.
There would be two ways of doing this:
Going to the advanced options of Blog Search at:
http://search.blogger.com/advanced_blog_search?hl=en&ui=blg
and entering your blog name and search terms.
Using a shortcut to Blog Search by saving this link and changing the search term “blog+tools” to the words you are looking for:
http://search.blogger.com/blogsearch?as_epq=blog+tools&ui=blg&as_q=&as_bt=&bl_url=Blog Bloke.com&blg
If you wish to refine your search further, e.g. by date, you could use the advanced search adding the options you want and copy the relevant extra code to your shortcut.
Hi Sueblimely.
Take that idea to the next level: http://blog.Blog Bloke.com/2007/04/shout-your-blog-add-search-tags-to-your.html
Thanks for dropping by and cheers!
Thanks for the tip, it is appreciated