How to change your Comment Footer from "No Comments" to "Leave a Comment" on your Blogger template

I know how irritating it is to try and find a solution to this automatic "no comments" link at the foot of your blog posts. It's annoying and that's not all, having the link show up as "no comments" can be taken the wrong way. Folks reading your blog may assume that you have disabled comments, it is definitely not user-friendly or productive for your blog.

So, I searched the net for days, my frustration...well, you can imagine. Finally, I found a solution.
It may not be the most fabulous solution in terms of being aesthetically pleasing to the eyes however, it does the job.  Without deleting any code whatsoever, you can create a customized line of wording to include at the footer. Whereas, at the moment it may say "No comments:", you can change it to something more user-friendly like "Leave a Comment".

Now, like I said, be forewarned, it is not the most beautiful aesthetic, but that's not really what I was going for and at a minimum it is a temporary solution.  After updating the HTML code (very simple stuff here folks), this is how my comment footer looks:

As you can see, it now says "Leave a Comment" just before the words "No comments, So Far". Again, it is not the ideal solution that I was looking for, but unlike Wordpress, where the developers of the actual theme or plugin are available to offer support, I had zero luck with finding assistance anywhere on Blogger or any other forums. My theme is Ethereal and it is one of the basic themes that Blogger offers. If you go and dig up the Ethereal theme you will notice that mine looks completely different and I assure you that it is the same exact one. The difference between the way that my Ethereal theme looks and the way that the Ethereal Theme options appear on Blogger, is that I went ahead and customized it with colors and backgrounds etc.

Here is what my original Ethereal Theme looked like:

I started out with Pink for the Girl Talk theme however, I have since changed the name to "Let's Talk" and thought that it would be less sugary and sweet, and more cut and dry to serve my purpose. As you can see, the tabs were all over the place and the side-panels were super wide. I minimized the panels and changed the background. Once I minimized the side panels and expanded the blog, the tabs fit in quite nicely.

Getting back to this code:

You'll want to go into your Theme and select "Edit HTML", have no fear, I have very minimal experience with HTML and if I can pull this off, so can you. Make sure that you backup your blog or copy and paste the entire contents into a blank page (for insurance purposes), BEFORE you make any changes or additions.  Once you're inside the HTML, you'll want to click on the "Control" and "F" Key's at the same time. That will bring up a little search bar at the top right hand of your blog's html (see below). You'll need to search for the following code: commentLabelFull  You can go ahead and copy it, and then paste it into that little search box at the top right hand corner. As you can see on my image below, I typed in "Leave A Comment...", I added 3 periods, in order to create space. The next thing you want to do after adding "Leave a Comment..." before ":" is to go down four lines to and add the words "so far" or any other language you plan on adding.

There you have it folks, if you're stuck with the Ethereal Theme, feel free to use this information to change your comment footer from "no comments" to "leave a comment" or any other text that you wish to add.  I haven't figured out how to completely rid myself of "No comments" and therefore, this is a temporary fix that will hopefully keep traffic on my site, and allow more users to interact with the comment box.   If you need simple help for small items that you have seen me implement onto the site, feel free to leave a comment or contact me for more information. I will be happy to help you.

Good luck and thanks for reading, if you have found this post at all helpful, feel free to share it, and of course, don't forget to follow me on Twitter/Google+ etc.

Until next time,

Casey