Oct 17, 2016 / Community Pool

Community Pool

The place for feedback, advice, and friendly blogging chatter.

Have you just published a new post and are dying for some feedback? Are you redesigning your blog and could use some layout or design advice from your more seasoned peers?

The Community Pool is for peer feedback and advice. Looking for more specific information? Check out some of these resources:

Tap into the wisdom of The Daily Post blogging community and leave your question here in the comments. Others can then click through and offer input either on your site, or in the comments here (feel free to indicate which you’d prefer).

Looking for free, self-guided courses to help you get started with your blog (or revive a dormant one)? Check out our current offerings at Blogging U.

To help us make the Community Pool a productive space for discussion, here are some tips and guidelines you might find useful:

  • While you’re not required to, we encourage everyone who requests feedback to also reply to at least one or two other bloggers who need some help. Spread the love!
  • The Community Pool comments section can get quite big — and starting duplicate threads doesn’t help. Thanks for not posting the same question more than once, as well as for not starting numerous threads in a single Pool.
  • If you’re looking for quality feedback, be as specific as you can. Questions about a particular post tend to draw more comments than ones about entire blogs. Questions about specific design elements are more likely to be answered than ones asking for general layout advice.
  • We discourage leaving links without a more substantive message or question. These are often overlooked by other bloggers, and we frequently remove them to make the comment reading experience smoother. Also note that including multiple links in your comment might automatically put it in the moderation queue, which will delay its publication.
  • Please keep all comments civil and constructive. The idea is to have fun — it’s a pool, after all!
  • To keep from losing your place in the comment thread while you visit others’ blogs, right-click on a link to open it in a new tab or window.
  • If you haven’t looked at our Commenting Guidelines in a while, now might be a good time.
  • No running on the deck.

Are you a new blogger looking to share your very first post? We have a special forum for bloggers just like you in our weekly First Friday posts.

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    1. Just commented. So cool! Good content, good tagging, cool pictures. Rock on 😀

      Would you check out one of my pieces? Click on my name and choose whichever one looks most interesting🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I like how you gave us a backstory before the recipe. It made it more interesting than a typical recipe post. I’ve learned that my taste buds change over time. Every few years, I force myself to try some food that I used to detest. Things I’ve been able to add to my diet that way are beets and cilantro. https://gracelead.co

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I love the layout of your blog and story behind each photo. Perhaps one idea could be to organize the menu more so certain photos are under ‘travel’ or ‘photo challenge’ and people can easily search to find photos they enjoy or want to see more of.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. I am so happy to hear that. Yes, I do take all my pictures. I am teaching myself photography and this food blog is pushing me to keep improving. I hope you will try out some of my recipes. I sincerely believe that eating homemade, wholesome food is the way to good health. An occasional indulgence, like this apple pie, though should be savored guilt-free if we eat well most of the time!

        Liked by 1 person

      1. Thank you so much for your kind words and for taking the time to check out by post. It is nice to hear feedback like this. I was getting a little dejected cause of lack of readership. I guess I just need to keep striving forward. Thank you!

        Liked by 2 people

    1. Just commented. Nice content, nice image. My suggestion: you have an image on your homepage, but when I click on a post, the featured image isn’t actually in the post — consider including it! 🙂

      Would you check out one of my pieces? Click on my name and choose whichever one looks most interesting🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Hi Giulia, first I love the style and design of your blog, especially the quote images I’ve seen on some of your articles. For this new column, as you say the subject is quite broad so maybe you could have different weeks that are more specific – i.e. this week looking at inspiration for my career, this week looking at inspiration from works of art etc. It may help garner more responses. Good luck with it!

      Liked by 3 people

    1. Just stopped by 🙂 Nice poem! Question: have you ever thought about not using punctuation at the end of a line? It might be a good way to switch things up. Lines that don’t end in punctuation are called enjambed lines; ones that end with a period or comma or dash or whatnot are called end-stopped lines. Enjambed lines might be a good next step for your poetry! 🙂

      Would you check out one of my pieces? Click on my name and choose whichever one looks most interesting🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Loved your work! I’ll definitely be reading more! Care to return the favour? Click on my name to see some of my poetry if you’d like 🙂

      Liked by 2 people

  11. Hello,
    I am sure you will like my blog, but all you need is to take some time to visit it.
    do check out my blog, I’d be grateful!
    leave a comment too so that I can visit your blog too!
    If you love what I write, make sure you join my raeding community and I will join yours, If I like what you write…
    have a great day!:)

    Liked by 8 people

    1. I love this post, it’s very similar to a post of mine below. It’s so scary opening up your innermost thoughts and feelings to your real friends and family, but it can also be quite freeing. My most helpful tip so far is just take a deep breath and do it! What’s the worst that can happen! Another tip for your blog is to make your tags visible – I received this tip recently and it’s really helped improve the reach of my site. Keep it up! https://craftingmylifeblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/on-being-a-scaredy-cat-fear-confidence-blogging-friendship/

      Liked by 4 people

      1. Thanks so much for your help. Though with my anxiety, the worst thing that could happen is a lot of things. I’ll definitely try the tags thing though, that seems like it would be awesome. Thanks for taking the time to read!

        Liked by 3 people

    2. I can relate. It’s really hard for me to be vulnerable and share my personal life. I haven’t connected my blog with my social media just yet. At least you made a twitter, that’s a good step!

      Liked by 2 people

    3. I can see why you would be a little freaked out about all of this. Just make sure you have certain security features set on each of your social media platforms that you are using to help protect yourself and only put out there what you want people to know! With technology changing how people do business, having a social media presence helps to promote your business ventures!

      Like

  15. Hi everyone,
    I have been blogging for just under 2 months and have been so grateful to have gained a small following and people who are interested in my photography and writing.
    I was wondering if someone could take the time to give my latest writing challenge a quick read. I take part in some of the one-word prompts. I was wondering if most people prefer that I include personal stories or if I should just talk about the word in general.

    Conquering Fears Through Trust | One-Word Prompt

    Liked by 8 people

    1. I think personal stories are more effective — they let your readers get to know you. Generalizations are never as good as showing the depth of your connection to the prompt word as a specific story is. I liked your escalator story! 🙂

      Would you check out one of my pieces? Click on my name and choose whichever one looks most interesting🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I loved the imagery on your blog! I think you should include personal stories on the one word prompts, although you could always switch between including them and not including. I also do a lot of writing and photography, if you want to check out my work click my name 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

    1. I liked your post about the election memes and then I read about “This is Us”. I haven’t gotten a chance to watch it yet. I was going to start watching it but haven’t gotten around to it yet. I was more interested in seeing how Justin Hartley transitioned to it from doing soap operas!

      Like

      1. You should definitely watch it as soon as you can!
        And Justin’s actually holding up pretty well. He had a great dramatic scene in the first episode that I was impressed with. As much as soaps are cheesy, I think it does help actors prepare for really dramatic scenes in other, better stuff.

        Liked by 2 people

      2. He was awesome as a soap star so it is cool to see him expand like this. Don’t know if you were aware, he also played on Smallville if you are into superhero shows like that!

        Like

      1. Thank you for the feedback😊. Should I continue these, because the inspiration for these is very rare to come by, although I can write longer ones anytime I want to.

        Liked by 2 people

    3. I like the short ones. Perhaps you could put your Random Thoughts posts in to a Category by that name. You could put your longer posts into one or more categories. Then you could add a Menu that shows your categories. It would make it convenient for visitors to find their favorites. https://gracelead.co

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Your post was a good read. I appreciate your point of view. The fear factor in sharing would be different depending on type of blog. My blog is not directly about me. It contains my thoughts on one topic, leadership. This makes for a low fear-factor in telling all my friends and family about it. Sure, they may still not like it; however, their disapproval won’t affect me as much as if I were sharing more personal topics. https://gracelead.co

      Like

    2. Interesting post. None of my friends/family know that I have a blog. I haven’t told any of them I guess out of fear of them judging me for my thoughts and opinions. It seems so much easier to have complete strangers who don’t know you to read your writings…they seem less judgmental!

      Liked by 1 person

  20. Hello! I have just started a book review site but I do not know how to make it so that the comments that anyone writes shows up on the page, not just my emails. Any other feedback would be useful. My site is RachelsReadsReviewsblog.wordpress.com

    Thanks!

    Liked by 6 people

    1. Go into WPAdmin > Settings > Discussion. You may want to remove the check next to email required for comments. That way a person could comment directly from their blog as they are reading your post. I do advise that you keep the check beside comments must be manually approved. That way you decide if a comment is appropriate before it shows on your blog. Sadly, there are sometimes spam comments that come to you. https://gracelead.co

      Like

    2. Hi Rachel! I think the problem is that your ‘comment’ page is really a ‘contact’ page, so any submissions aren’t published as they aren’t meant to be. At the bottom of your ‘Books’ page there is a space for comment replies, and if someone was to comment there, then that would be public (assuming you approve the comment).

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Just commented. Nice content. Do you use tags? If not, consider it! They help new readers find your blog. You can have 15 tags and categories per post total.

      Would you check out one of my pieces? Click on my name and choose whichever one looks most interesting🙂

      Liked by 1 person