As your blog begins to gather a head of steam, and more and more comments from readers begin popping up, you may be wondering how you can better showcase those comments. It’s easy.

As you may have already seen, some blogs have a slightly different comments widget in the sidebar, which displays short excerpts. Adding this is simply a matter of switching the old widget to the new one. Here’s what the old one looked like on Fred Snowflack’s “Morris Politics” blog:

Simple "Recent Comments" widget

And here’s the new one:

New "Get Recent Comments" widget with excerpts

To switch the widgets, go into the backend of your blog, select DESIGN –> WIDGETS, and then follow these instructions: