A love song to all commenters

The blogger One among many has initiated what has turned into a sort of love song to all commenters in the blogosphere. She has tagged a few bloggers – including me – and asked them to recall and link to the first person ever to comment on our blogs and give them our proper thanks.

Who could resist such a request? Of course I want to thank – not only the first one who commented, but every single one if it was possible. The comments are just as essential to building this inn as the post themselves. I think it’s like comparing a solo instrument to a whole orchestra. I don’t mind a single flute, but it will sound pretty lonely after a while. Without the ideas bouncing around in the comments the atmosphere really wouldn’t be the same. I mean it when I say it: we build this blog together.

The first comment
This said I should of course do as she requests and thank the first commenter properly. The first comment I ever got was on my second post written, To level quickly or with pleasure? I wrote it on February 3 and got a comment the day after, from Consentire, who at that time ran a Swedish WoW blog which had inspired me to start blogging. A couple of guildies commented as well – and to be honest I don’t think many people except for those read my blog for the first months.

In April I took the decision start the process of converting the whole blog into English. I got several comments on the post where I announced it. The quickest one to reply was Joshua, who runs WarcraftBloggers, which aggregates feeds from hundreds of WoW blogs. He informed me that he just had added me, which of course made me proud and excited.

Two established bloggers were quick to comment as well. The first one came from Softi at A little WoW for me:

oh great! I'm glad you've decided to make this change. Your english has so far been really easy to read so you can't be that bad at it! :P

The second one came from Aurik at /hug. He was – and still is – one of my favourite bloggers and I had commented on his blogs a couple of times. For instance I had given him a list where I had translated the headlines of a number of my Swedish Blog entries, trying to give him a picture of what my blog was about. Now he wrote me this:

Finally I can comment enthusiastically on your posts for a change! I'm glad you decided to go through with it and just sad that I didn't know Swedish in the first place to read it. Don't worry too much about your English - it's totally understandable and far more gramatically correct than mine will ever be.

I really hope you get more visitors by blogging in English - even when you write for yourself it's nice to know that others out there are reading and appreciating something which you have enjoyed writing. I hope, too, that you don't find it a chore to translate so much and lose the joy of the writing itself.

*Comes back from reading all of the currently translated posts*

Awesome work, keep it up!

/hug/

vanish

What it meant
I don’t know if I ever thanked you properly, Joshua, Softi and Aurik. But here it is: a thanks coming from the bottom of my burning little gnomish heart. You know what comments to an insecure newbie blogger means. This really helped me to get the confidence I needed to go on with my mission to go for an English blog.

I try once in a while to pay this forward, to comment not only on established blogs but on new ones. I think a blogger is born twice – the first time starting the blog – the second time getting the first comment from a stranger. We all should help out to give birth to the new bloggers. Whenever I see an excellent blog post with 0 comments, my heart aches a little. I don’t comment as much as I would like to – there are too many blogs out there, so the task is a bit overwhelming. But I try to make footprints here and there, remembering my own first days as a blogger.

A linking memory
Finally I have to give another shoutout, to Matticus. One month after I had turned English his eyes happened to fall on a short little blogpost of mine about such an obscure topic as onion chopping. He linked to it and called it “interesting” or something like that. Somehow I can still feel that gentle kind pat on the shoulder, it keeps me going.

Commenters and linkers out there. This is my love song to all of you. Feel the warmth!

/hug