Journal tags: blogs

Right now, Twitter feels like Dunkirk beach in May 1940. And look, here comes a plucky armada of web servers running Mastodon instances!

Others have written some guides to getting started on Mastodon:

• An oversimplified guide to setting up Mastodon by Sarah Higley,
• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by Noëlle Anthony,
• 10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience by Jens Oliver Meiert, and
• How to Get Started on Mastodon by Justin Pot for Wired.

There are also tools like Twitodon to help you migrate from Twitter to Mastodon.

Getting on board isn’t completely frictionless. Understanding how Mastodon works can be confusing. But then again, so was Twitter fifteen years ago.

Right now, many Mastodon instances are struggling with the influx of new sign-ups. But this is temporary. And actually, it’s also very reminiscent of the early unreliable days of Twitter.

I don’t want to go into the technical details of Mastodon and the fediverse—even though those details are fascinating and impressive. What I’m really struck by is the vibe.

In a nutshell, I’m loving it! It feels …nice.

I was fully expecting Mastodon to be full of meta-discussions about Mastodon, but in the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed people posting about stone circles, astronomy, and—obviously—cats and dogs.

The process of finding people to follow has been slow, but in a good way. I’ve enjoyed seeking people out. It’s been easier to find the techy folks, but I’ve also been finding scientists, journalists, and artists.

On the one hand, the niceness of the experience isn’t down to technical architecture; it’s all about the social norms. On the other hand, those social norms are very much directed by technical decisions. The folks working on the fediverse for the past few years have made very thoughtful design decisions to amplify niceness and discourage nastiness. It’s all very gratifying to experience!

Personally, I’m posting to Mastodon via my own website. As much as I’m really enjoying Mastodon, I still firmly believe that nothing beats having control of your own content on your domain.

But I also totally get that not everyone has the same set of priorities as me. And frankly, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to have their own domain name.

It’s like there’s a spectrum of ownership. On one end, there’s publishing on your own website. On the other end, there’s publishing on silos like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Instagram, and MySpace.

Publishing on Mastodon feels much closer to the website end of the spectrum than it does to the silo end of the spectrum. If something bad happens to the Mastodon instance you’re on, you can up and move to a different instance, taking your social graph with you.

In a way, it’s like delegating domain ownership to someone you trust. If you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or interest in having your own domain, but you trust someone who’s running a Mastodon instance, it’s the next best thing to publishing on your own website.

Simon described it well when he said Mastodon is just blogs:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

And rather than compare Mastodon to Twitter, Simon makes a comparison with RSS:

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

Lots of other folks are feeling the same excitement in the air that I’m getting:

Bastian wrote:

Real conversations. Real people. Interesting content. A feeling of a warm welcoming group. No algorithm to mess around with our timelines. No troll army to destory every tiny bit of peace. Yes, Mastodon is rough around the edges. Many parts are not intuitive. But this roughness somehow added to the positive experience for me.

This could really work!

Brent Simmons wrote:

The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.

I concur! Though, like Paul, I love not being beholden to either Twitter or Mastodon:

I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.

But like I said, I don’t expect everyone to have the time, means, or inclination to do that. Mastodon definitely feels like it shares the same indie web spirit though.

Personally, I recommend experiencing Mastodon through the website rather than a native app. Mastodon instances are progressive web apps so you can add them to your phone’s home screen.

You can find me on Mastodon as @adactio@mastodon.social

I’m not too bothered about what instance I’m on. It really only makes a difference to my local timeline. And if I do end up finding an instance I prefer, then I know that migrating will be quite straightforward, by design. Perhaps I should be on an instance with a focus on front-end development or the indie web. I still haven’t found much of an Irish traditional music community on the fediverse. I’m wondering if maybe I should start a Mastodon instance for that.

While I’m a citizen of mastodon.social, I’m doing my bit by chipping in some money to support it: sponsorship levels on Patreon start at just $1 a month. And while I can’t offer much technical assistance, I opened my first Mastodon pull request with a suggested improvement for the documentation.

I’m really impressed with the quality of the software. It isn’t perfect but considering that it’s an open source project, it’s better than most VC-backed services with more and better-paid staff. As Giles said, comparing it to Twitter:

I’m using Mastodon now and it’s not the same, but it’s not shit either. It’s different. It takes a bit of adjustment. And I’m enjoying it.

Most of all, I love, love, love that Mastodon demonstrates that things can be different. For too long we’ve been told that behavioural advertising was an intrinsic part of being online, that social networks must inevitably be monolithic centralised beasts, that we have to relinquish control to corporations in order to be online. The fediverse is showing us a better way. And this isn’t just a proof of concept either. It’s here now. It’s here to stay, if you want it.

I’ve added five more faces to the UX London line-up.

Irina Rusakova will be giving a talk on day one, the day that focuses on research. Her talk on designing with the autistic community is one I’m really looking forward to.

Also on day one, my friend and former Clearleftie Cennydd Bowles will be giving a workshop called “What could go wrong?” He literally wrote the book on ethical design.

Day two is all about creation. My co-worker Chris How will be speaking. “Nepotism!” you cry! But no, Chris is speaking because I had the chance to his talk—called “Unexpectedly obvious”—and I thought “that’s perfect for UX London!”:

Let him take you on a journey through time and across the globe sharing stories of designs that solve problems in elegant if unusual ways.

Also on day two, you’ve got two additional workshops. Lou Downe will be running a workshop on designing good services, and Giles Turnbull will be running a workshop called “Writing for people who hate writing.”

I love that title! Usually when I contact speakers I don’t necessarily have a specific talk or workshop in mind, but I knew that I wanted that particular workshop from Giles.

When I wrote to Giles to ask come and speak, I began by telling how much I enjoy his blog—I’m a long-time suscriber to his RSS feed. He responded and said that he also reads my blog—we’re blog buddies! (That’s a terrible term but there should be a word for people who “know” each other only through reading each other’s websites.)

Anyway, that’s another little treasure trove of speakers added to the UX London roster:

• Irina Rusakova
• Cennydd Bowles
• Chris How
• Lou Downe
• Giles Turnbull

That’s nineteen speakers already and we’re not done yet—expect further speaker announcements soon. But don’t wait on those announcements before getting your ticket. Get yours now!

A while back I wrote a blog post called Web Audio API weirdness on iOS. I described a bug in Mobile Safari along with a hacky fix. I finished by saying:

If you ever find yourself getting weird but inconsistent behaviour on iOS using the Web Audio API, this nasty little hack could help.

Recently Jonathan Aldrich posted a thread about the same bug. He included a link to my blog post. He also said:

Thanks so much for your post, this was a truly pernicious problem!

That warms the cockles of my heart. It’s very gratifying to know that documenting the bug (and the fix) helped someone out. Or, as I put it:

Yay for bugblogging!

Forgive the Germanic compound word, but in this case I think it fits.

Bugblogging doesn’t need to involve a solution. Just documenting a bug is a good thing to do. Recently I documented a bug with progressive web apps on iOS. Before that I documented a bug in Facebook Container for Firefox. When I documented some weird behaviour with the Web Share API in Safari on iOS, I wasn’t even sure it was a bug but Tess was pretty sure it was and filed a proper bug report.

I’ve benefited from other people bugblogging. Phil Nash wrote Service workers: beware Safari’s range request. That was exactly what I needed to solve a problem I’d been having. And then that post about Phil solving my problem helped Peter Rukavina solve a similar issue so he wrote Phil Nash and Jeremy Keith Save the Safari Video Playback Day.

Again, this warmed the cockles of my heart. Bugblogging is worth doing just for the reward of that feeling.

There’s a similar kind of blog post where, instead of writing about a bug, you write about a particular technique. In one way, this is the opposite of bugblogging because you’re writing about things working exactly as they should. But these posts have a similar feeling to bugblogging because they also result in a warm glow when someone finds them useful.

Here are some recent examples of these kinds of posts—tipblogging?—that I’ve found useful:

• Eric wrote about flexibly centering an element with side-sligned content using CSS.
• Rich documented how to subset a variable font on a Mac.
• Stephanie wrote about a CSS technique for animating in a newly added element.

All three are very handy tips. Thanks, Eric! Thanks, Rich! Thanks, Stephanie!

I’ve already had some thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post about trust. I wrapped up my thoughts with a request:

I would love it if someone could explain why they avoid native browser features but use third-party code.

Chris obliged:

I can’t speak for the industry, but I have a guess. Third-party code (like the referenced Bootstrap and React) have a history of smoothing over significant cross-browser issues and providing better-than-browser ergonomic APIs. jQuery was created to smooth over cross-browser JavaScript problems. That’s trust.

Very true! jQuery is the canonical example of a library smoothing over the bumpy landscape of browser compatibilities. But jQuery is also the canonical example of a library we no longer need because the browsers have caught up …and those browsers support standards directly influenced by jQuery. That’s a library success story!

Charles Harries takes on my question in his post Libraries over browser features:

I think this perspective of trust has been hammered into developers over the past maybe like 5 years of JavaScript development based almost exclusively on inequality of browser feature support. Things are looking good in 2022; but as recently as 2019, 4 of the 5 top web developer needs had to do with browser compatibility.

Browser compatibility is one of the underlying promises that libraries—especially the big ones that Jeremy references, like React and Bootstrap—make to developers.

So again, it’s browser incompatibilities that made libraries attractive.

Jim Nielsen responds with the same message in his post Trusting Browsers:

We distrust the browser because we’ve been trained to. Years of fighting browser deficiencies where libraries filled the gaps. Browser enemy; library friend.

For example: jQuery did wonders to normalize working across browsers. Write code once, run it in any browser — confidently.

Three for three. My question has been answered: people gravitated towards libraries because browsers had inconsistent implementations.

I’m deliberately using the past tense there. I think Jim is onto something when he says that we’ve been trained not to trust browsers to have parity when it comes to supporting standards. But that has changed.

Charles again:

This approach isn’t a sustainable practice, and I’m trying to do as little of it as I can. Jeremy is right to be suspicious of third-party code. Cross-browser compatibility has gotten a lot better, and campaigns like Interop 2022 are doing a lot to reduce the burden. It’s getting better, but the exasperated I-just-want-it-to-work mindset is tough to uninstall.

I agree. Inertia is a powerful force. No matter how good cross-browser compatibility gets, it’s going to take a long time for developers to shed their suspicion.

Jim is glass-half-full kind of guy:

I’m optimistic that trust in browser-native features and APIs is being restored.

He also points to a very sensible mindset when it comes to third-party libraries and frameworks:

In this sense, third-party code and abstractions can be wonderful polyfills for the web platform. The idea being that the default posture should be: leverage as much of the web platform as possible, then where there are gaps to creating great user experiences, fill them in with exploratory library or framework features (features which, conceivably, could one day become native in browsers).

Yes! A kind of progressive enhancement approach to using third-party code makes a lot of sense. I’ve always maintained that you should treat libraries and frameworks like cattle, not pets. Don’t get too attached. If the library is solving a genuine need, it will be replaced by stable web standards in browsers (again, see jQuery).

I think that third-party libraries and frameworks work best as polyfills. But the whole point of polyfills is that you only use them when the browsers don’t supply features natively (and you also go back and remove the polyfill later when browsers do support the feature). But that’s not how people are using libraries and frameworks today. Developers are reaching for them by default instead of treating them as a last resort.

I like Jim’s proposed design princple:

Where available, default to browser-native features over third party code, abstractions, or idioms.

(P.S. It’s kind of lovely to see this kind of thoughtful blog-to-blog conversation happening. Right at a time when Twitter is about to go down the tubes, this is a demonstration of an actual public square with more nuanced discussion. Make your own website and join the conversation!)

I mentioned recently that there might be quite a difference in tone between my links and my journal here on my website:

’Sfunny, when I look back at older journal entries they’re often written out of frustration, usually when something in the dev world is bugging me. But when I look back at all the links I’ve bookmarked the vibe is much more enthusiastic, like I’m excitedly pointing at something and saying “Check this out!” I feel like sentiment analyses of those two sections of my site would yield two different results.

My journal entries have been even more specifically negative of late. I’ve been bitchin’ and moanin’ about web browsers. But at least I’m an equal-opportunities bitcher and moaner.

• Mozilla, I complained about your Facebook Container extension for Firefox.
• Apple, I complained about the ridiculous way Safari’s update cycle is tied to operating system.
• Google, I complained about the way a breaking change was rolled out in Chrome (and the implications for future breaking changes).
• Microsoft, you got off lightly. But please consider any of my criticisms of Chrome to apply to Edge too, seeing as they’re basically the same now.

I wish my journal weren’t so negative, but my mithering behaviour has been been encouraged. On more than one occasion, someone I know at a browser company has taken me aside to let me know that I should blog about any complaints I might have with their browser. It sounds counterintuitive, I know. But these blog posts can give engineers some ammunition to get those issues prioritised and fixed.

So my message to you is this: if there’s something about a web browser that you’re not happy with (or, indeed, if there’s something you’re really happy with), take the time to write it down and publish it.

Publish it on your website. You could post your gripes on Twitter but whinging on Jack’s website is just pissing in the wind. And I suspect you also might put a bit more thought into a blog post on your own site.

I know it’s a cliché to say that browser makers want to hear from developers—and I’m often cynical about it myself—but they really do want to know what we think. Share your thoughts. I’ll probably end up linking to what you write.

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it’s me pointing at something and saying “Check this out!”

Secondly, it’s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think “Now what would past me have tagged it with?” Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It’s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I’ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it’s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called “extras” where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It’s mostly for my own benefit. That’s where I’ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here’s a funny thing …for all the times that I’ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on—vavatch.co.uk—so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it’s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I’m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That’s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

I’m subscribed to a lot of blogs in my RSS reader. I follow some people because what they write about is very different to what I know about. But I also follow lots of people who have similar interests and ideas to me. So I’m not exactly in an echo chamber, but I do have the reverb turned up pretty high.

Sometimes these people post thoughts that are eerily similar to what I’ve been thinking about. Ethan has been known to do this. Get out of my head, Marcotte!

But even if Ethan wasn’t some sort of telepath, he’d still be in my RSS reader. We’re friends. Lots of the people in my RSS reader are my friends. When I read their words, I can hear their voices.

Then there are the people I’ve never met. Like Desirée García, Piper Haywood, or Jim Nielsen. Never met them, don’t know them, but damn, do I enjoy reading their blogs. Last year alone, I ended up linking to Jim’s posts ten different times.

Or Baldur Bjarnason. I can’t remember when I first came across his writing, but it really, really resonates with me. I probably owe him royalties for the amount of times I’ve cited his post Over-engineering is under-engineering.

His latest post is postively Marcottian in how it exposes what’s been fermenting in my own mind. But because he writes clearly, it really helps clarify my own thinking. It’s often been said that you should write to figure out what you think, and I can absolutely relate to that. But here’s a case where somebody else’s writing really helps to solidify my own thoughts.

Which type of novelty-seeking web developer are you?

It starts with some existentialist stock-taking. I can relate, what with the whole five decades thing. But then it turns the existential questioning to the World Wide Web itself, or rather, the people building the web.

In a way, it’s like taking the question of the great divide (front of the front end and back of the front end), and then turning it 45 degrees to reveal an entirely hidden dimension.

In examining the nature of the web, he hits on the litmus of how you view encapsulation:

I mention this first as it’s the aspect of the web that modern web developers hate the most without even giving it a label. Single-Page-Apps and GraphQL are both efforts to eradicate the encapsulation that’s baked into the foundation of every layer of the web.

Most modern devs are trying to get rid of it but it’s one of the web’s most strategic advantages.

I hadn’t thought of this before.

By default, if you don’t go against the grain of the web, each HTTP endpoint is encapsulated from each other.

Moreover, all of this can happen really fast if you aren’t going overboard with your CSS and JS.

He finishes with a look at another of the web’s most powerful features: distribution. In between are the things that make the web webby: hypertext and flexibility (The Dao of the Web).

It’s the idea that the web isn’t a single fixed thing but a fluid multitude whose shape is dictated by its surroundings.

This resonates with me because it highlights two different ways of viewing the web.

On the one hand, you can see the web purely as a distribution channel. In the past you might have been distributing a Flash movie. These days you might be distributing a single page app. Either way, the web is there as a low-friction way of getting your creation in front of other people.

The other way of building for the web is to go with the web’s grain, embracing flexibility and playing to the strengths of the medium through progressive enhancement. This is the distinction I was getting at when I talked about something being not just on the web, but of the web.

With that mindset, Baldur then takes us through some of the technologies that he’s excited about, like SvelteKit and Hotwire. I think it’s the same mindset that got me excited about service workers. As Baldur says:

They are helping the web become better at being its own thing.

That’s my tagline right there.

A little while back, Marcus Herrmann wrote about making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page. Here’s his feeds page. Here’s Remy’s.

Seems like a good idea to me. I’ve made mine:

adactio.com/feeds

As well as linking to the usual RSS feeds (blog posts, links, notes), it’s also got an explanation of how you can subscribe to a customised RSS feed using tags.

Then, earlier today, I was chatting with Matt on Twitter and he asked:

btw do you share your blogroll anywhere?

So now I’ve added another URL:

adactio.com/feeds/subscriptions

That’s got a link to my OPML file, exported from my feed reader, and a list of the (current) RSS feeds that I’m subscribed to.

I like the idea of blogrolls making a comeback. And webrings.

We’re all hunkering down in our homes. That seems to be true of our online homes too.

People are sharing their day-to-day realities on their websites and I’m here for it. Like, I’m literally here for it. I can’t go anywhere.

On an episode of the Design Observer podcast, Jessica Helfand puts this into context:

During times of crisis, people want to make things. There’s a surge in the keeping of journals when there’s a war… it’s a response to the feeling of vulnerability, like corporeal vulnerability. My life is under attack. I am imprisoned in my house. I have to make something to say I was here, to say I mattered, to say this day happened… It’s like visual graphic reassurance.

It’s not just about crisis though. Scott Kelly talks about the value of keeping a journal during prolonged periods of repitition. And he should know—he spent a year in space:

NASA has been studying the effects of isolation on humans for decades, and one surprising finding they have made is the value of keeping a journal. Throughout my yearlong mission, I took the time to write about my experiences almost every day. If you find yourself just chronicling the days’ events (which, under the circumstances, might get repetitive) instead try describing what you are experiencing through your five senses or write about memories. Even if you don’t wind up writing a book based on your journal like I did, writing about your days will help put your experiences in perspective and let you look back later on what this unique time in history has meant.

That said, just stringing a coherent sentence together can seem like too much during The Situation. That’s okay. Your online home can also provide relief and distraction through tidying up. As Ethan puts it:

let a website be a worry stone

It can be comforting to get into the zone doing housekeeping on your website. How about a bit of a performance audit? Or maybe look into more fluid typography? Or perhaps now is the time to tinker about with that dark mode you’ve been planning?

Whatever you end up doing, my point is that your website is quite literally an outlet. While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

I’m in San Francisco to speak at An Event Apart, which kicks off tomorrow. But I arrived a few days early so that I could attend Indie Web Camp SF.

Yesterday was the discussion day. Most of the attendees were seasoned indie web campers, so quite a few of the discussions went deep on some of the building blocks. It was a good opportunity to step back and reappraise technology decisions.

Today is the day for making, tinkering, fiddling, and hacking. I had a few different ideas of what to do, mostly around showing additional context on my blog posts. I could, for instance, show related posts—other blog posts (or links) that have similar tags attached to them.

But I decided that a nice straightforward addition would be to show a kind of “on this day” context. After all, I’ve been writing blog posts here for eighteen years now; chances are that if I write a blog post on any given day, there will be something in the archives from that same day in previous years.

So that’s what I’ve done. I’ll be demoing it shortly here at Indie Web Camp, but you can see it in action now. If you look at the page for this blog post, you should see a section at the end with the heading “Previously on this day”. There you’ll see links to other posts I’ve written on December 8th in years gone by.

It’s quite a mixed bag. There’s a post about when I used to have a webcam from sixteen years ago. There’s a report from the Flash On The Beach conference from thirteen years ago (I wrote that post while I was in Berlin). And five years ago, I was writing about markup patterns for web components.

I don’t know if anyone other than me will find this feature interesting (but as it’s my website, I don’t really care). Personally, I find it fascinating to see how my writing has changed, both in terms of subject matter and tone.

Needless to say, the further back in time you go, the more chance there is that the links in my blog posts will no longer work. That’s a real shame. But then it’s a pleasant surprise when I find something that I linked to that is still online after all this time. And I can take comfort from the fact that if anyone has ever linked to anything I’ve written on my website, then those links still work.

Here’s a crazy idea: threaded tweets, but logged together, on a single webpage. A ‘weblog’, if you will.

— Paul Lloyd (@paulrobertlloyd) March 21, 2017

Some people have been putting Paul’s crazy idea into practice.

• Mike revived his site a while back and he’s been posting gold dust ever since. I enjoy his no-holds-barred perspective on his time in San Francisco.
• Garrett’s writing goes all the way back to 2005. The cumulative result is two fascinating interweaving narratives—one about his health, another about his business.
• Charlotte has been documenting her move from Brighton to Sydney. Much as I love her articles about front-end development, I’m liking the slice-of-life updates on life down under even more.
• Amber has a great way with words. As well as regularly writing on her blog, she’s two-thirds of the way through writing 100 words every day for 100 days.
• Ethan has been writing about responsive design—of course—but it’s his more personal posts that make me really grateful for his site.
• Jeffrey and Eric never stopped writing on their own sites. Sure, there’s good stuff on their about web design and development, but it’s the writing about their non-web lives that’s so powerful.

There are more people I could mention …but, to be honest, not that many more. Seems like most people are happy to only publish on Ev’s blog or not at all.

I know not everybody wants to write on the web, and that’s fine. But it makes me sad when people choose not to publish their thoughts because they think no-one will be interested, or that it’s all been said before. I understand where those worries come from, but I believe—no, I know—that they are unfounded.

It’s a world wide web out there. There’s plenty of room for everyone. And I, for one, love reading the words of others.

There’s nothing quite so tedious as blogging about blogging, but I came across a few heart-warming thoughts recently that it would be remiss of me to let go unremarked, so please indulge me for a moment as I wallow in some meta-blogging.

Marco Arment talks about the trend that many others have noticed, of personal publishing dying out in favour of tweeting:

Too much of my writing in the last few years has gone exclusively into Twitter. I need to find a better balance.

As he rightly points out:

Twitter is a complementary medium to blogging, but it’s not a replacement.

Andy noticed a similar trend in his own writing:

Twitter and Waxy Links cannibalized all the smaller posts, and as my reach grew, I started reserving blogging for more “serious” stuff — mostly longer-form research and investigative writing.

Well, fuck that.

Amber Hewitt also talks about reviving the personal blog:

Someone made an analogy that describes social networks very well. Facebook is your neighborhood, Twitter is your local bar, and your blog is your home. (I guess Instagram is the cafe? “Look what I’m eating!”)

This made me realized I’m neglecting my home. My posts and photos are spread out on different networks and there is no centralized hub.

That reminds me of what Frank said about his site:

In light of the noisy, fragmented internet, I want a unified place for myself—the internet version of a quiet, cluttered cottage in the country.

The wonderful Gina Trapani—who has has publishing on her own site for years now—follows Andy’s lead with some guidelines for short-form blogging:

• If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post.
• Negotiate a comfort zone.
• Traffic is irrelevant.
• Simplify, simplify.
• Ask for trusted collaborator feedback.
• Have fun.

Good advice.

Jason Kottke wrote an end-of-the-year piece for the Nieman Journalism Lab called The blog is dead, long live the blog:

Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice.

But the second part of the article’s title is as important as the first:

Over the past 16 years, the blog format has evolved, had social grafted onto it, and mutated into Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest and those new species have now taken over.

Jason’s piece prompted some soul-searching. John Scalzi wrote The Death of the Blog, Again, Again. Colin Devroe wrote The blog isn’t dead. It is just sleeping.:

The advantages to using Facebook should be brought out onto the web. There should be no real disadvantage to using one platform or another. In fact, there should be an advantage to using your own platform rather than those of a startup that could go out of business at any moment.

That’s a common thread in amongst a number of the responses: the specific medium of the blog may certainly be waning, but the idea of independent publishing still burns brightly. Ben Werdmuller sums that feeling up, saying the blog might be dying, but the web’s about to fight back:

If you buy the idea that articles aren’t dying - and anecdotally, I know I read as much as I ever did online - then a blog is simply the delivery mechanism. It’s fine for that to die. Even welcome. In some ways, that death is due to the ease of use of the newer, siloed sites, and makes the way for new, different kinds of content consumption; innovation in delivery.

Kartik Prabhu writes about The Blogging Dead:

In any case, let’s not ‘blog’, let’s just write—on our own personal place on the Web.

In fact, Jason’s article was preceded by a lovely post from Jeffrey called simply This is a website:

Me, I regret the day I started calling what I do here “blogging.”

I know how he feels. I still call what I write here my “journal” rather than my “blog”. Call it what you like, publishing on your own website can be a very powerful move, now more than ever:

Blogging may have been a fad, a semi-comic emblem of a time, like CB Radio and disco dancing, but independent writing and publishing is not. Sharing ideas and passions on the only free medium the world has known is not a fad or joke.

One of the most overused buzzwords of today’s startup scene is the word “disruption”. Young tech upstarts like to proclaim how they’re going to “disrupt” some incumbent industry of the old world and sweep it away in a bright new networked way. But on today’s web of monolithic roach-motel silos like Facebook and Twitter, I can’t imagine a more disruptive act than choosing to publish on your own website.

It’s not a new idea. Far from it. Jeffrey launched a project called Independent’s Day in 2001:

No one is in control of this space. No one can tell you how to design it, how much to design it, when to “dial it down.” No one will hold your hand and structure it for you. No one will create the content for you.

Those words are twelve years old, but they sound pretty damn disruptive to me today.

Frank is planting his flag in his own sand with his minifesto Homesteading 2014

I’m returning to a personal site, which flips everything on its head. Rather than teasing things apart into silos, I can fuse together different kinds of content.

So, I’m doubling down on my personal site in 2014.

He is not alone. Many of us are feeling an increasing unease, even disgust, with the sanitised, shrink-wrapped, handholding platforms that make it oh-so-easy to get your thoughts out there …on their terms …for their profit.

Of course independent publishing won’t be easy. Facebook, Pinterest, Medium, Twitter, and Tumblr are all quicker, easier, more seductive. But I take great inspiration from the work being done at Indie Web Camp. Little, simple formats and protocols—like webmentions—can have a powerful effect in aggregate. Small pieces, loosely joined.

Mind you, it’s worth remembering that not everybody wants to be independent. Tyler Fisher wrote about this on Medium—“because it is easier and hopefully more people will see it”— in a piece called I’m 22 years old and what is this. :

Fighting to get the open web back sounds great. But I don’t know what that means.

If we don’t care about how the web works, how can we understand why it is important to own our data? Why would we try if what we can do now is so easy?

Therein lies the rub. Publishing on your own website is still just too damn geeky. The siren-call of the silos is backed up with genuinely powerful, easy to use, well-designed tools. I don’t know if independent publishing can ever compete with that.

In all likelihood, the independent web will never be able to match the power and reach of the silos. But that won’t stop me (and others) from owning our own words. If nothing else, we can at least demonstrate that the independent path is an option—even if that option requires more effort.

Like Tyler Fisher, Josh Miller describes his experience with a web of silos—the only web he has ever known:

Some folks are adamant that you should own your own words when you publish online. For example, to explain why he doesn’t use services like Quora, Branch, and Google-Plus, Dave Winer says: “I’m not going to put my writing in spaces that I have no control over. I’m tired of playing the hamster.”

As someone who went through puberty with social media, it is hard to relate to this sentiment. I have only ever “leased,” from the likes of LiveJournal (middle school), Myspace (middle school), Facebook (high school), and Twitter (college).

There’s a wonderful response from Gina Trapani:

For me, publishing on a platform I have some ownership and control over is a matter of future-proofing my work. If I’m going to spend time making something I really care about on the web—even if it’s a tweet, brevity doesn’t mean it’s not meaningful—I don’t want to do it somewhere that will make it inaccessible after a certain amount of time, or somewhere that might go away, get acquired, or change unrecognizably.

This! This is why owning your own words matters.

I have a horrible feeling that many of the people publishing with the easy-to-use tools of today’s social networks don’t realise how fragile their repository is, not least because everyone keeps repeating the lie that “the internet never forgets.”

Stephanie Georgopulos wrote a beautiful piece called Blogging Ourselves to Live—published on Medium, alas—describing the power of that lie:

We were told — warned, even — that what we put on the internet would be forever; that we should think very carefully about what we commit to the digital page. And a lot of us did. We put thought into it, we put heart into, we wrote our truths. We let our real lives bleed onto the page, onto the internet, onto the blog. We were told, “Once you put this here, it will remain forever.” And we acted accordingly.

Sadly, when you uncover the deceit of that lie, it is usually through bitter experience:

Occasionally I become consumed by the idea that I can somehow find — somehow restore — all the droppings I’ve left on the internet over the last two decades. I want back the IMed conversations that caused tears to roll from my eyes, I want back the alt girl e-zines I subscribed to, wrote poetry for. I fill out AOL’s Reset Password form and send new passwords to email addresses I don’t own anymore; I use the Way Back Machine to search for the diary I kept in 1999. I am hunting for tracks of my former self so I can take a glimpse or kill it or I don’t know what. The end result is always the same, of course; these things are gone, they have been wiped away, they do not exist.

I’m going to continue to publish here on my own website, journal, blog, or whatever you want to call it. It’s still possible that I might lose everything but I’d rather take the responsibility for that, rather than placing my trust in ”the cloud” someone else’s server. I’m owning my own words.

The problem is …I publish more than words. I publish pictures too, even the occasional video. I have the originals on my hard drive, but I’m very, very uncomfortable with the online home for my photos being in the hands of Yahoo, the same company that felt no compunction about destroying the cultural wealth of GeoCities.

Flickr has been a magnificent shining example of the web done right, but it is in an inevitable downward spiral. There are some good people still left there, but they are in the minority and I fear that they cannot fight off the douchtastic consultants of growth-hacking that have been called in to save the patient by killing it.

I’ve noticed that I’m taking fewer and fewer photos these days. I think that subconsciously, I’ve started the feel that publishing my photos to a third-party site—even one as historically excellent as Flickr—is a fragile, hollow experience.

In 2014, I hope to figure out a straightforward way to publish my own photos to my own website …while still allowing third-party sites to have a copy. It won’t be easy—binary formats are trickier to work with than text—but I want that feeling of independence.

I hope that you too will be publishing on your own website in 2014.

Tumblr is traditionally the home of fun and frivolous blogs: Moustair, Kim Jong-Ill Looking At Things, Missed High Fives, Selleck Waterfall Sandwich, and the weird but wonderful Consume Consume (warning: you may lose an entire day in there).

But there are also some more thoughtful collections on Tumblr:

• Abondonedography documents the strangely hypnotic lure of abandoned man-made structures, as does Abandoned Playgrounds.
• Adiphany shows some of the cleverer pieces from the world of advertising.
• Histories Past is a collection of fascinating historical photographs.
• Found is also a collection of photographs, all of them from the archives of National Geographic, many of them hitherto-unpublished.

It’s going to be real shame when Tumblr shuts down and deletes all that content.

Of course that will never happen. Just like that never would’ve happened to Posterous or Pownce or Vox or GeoCities — publishing platforms where millions of people published a panoply of posts from the frivolous to the sublime, all of them now destroyed, their URLs purged from the web.

That reminds me: there’s one other Tumblr-hosted blog I came across recently: Our Incredible Journey documents those vile and disgusting announcements that start-ups make when they get acquired by a larger company, right before they flush their user’s content (and trust) down the toilet.

Oh, and I’ve got a Tumblr blog too. I just use it for silly pictures, YouTube videos, and quotes. I don’t want it to hurt too much when it gets destroyed.

There has been a minor outbreak of handwringing and soul-searching amongst bloggers recently. Jon Udell asked Where have all the bloggers gone? Tim Bray responded with his own thoughts on the Blogodammerung. Paul Ford rallied with some straight-up old-fashioned blogging about the rotary dial.

For quite a while now, people have been pointing the finger at Twitter and Facebook, lamenting that these short-form services are time-sucking all their writing energy. There’s probably some truth to that but as harbingers of blogging doom go, they’re pretty weak. Some of us manage to both blog and tweet (I know, right‽).

If your craving to write is satiated by a service that limits you to 140 characters, then maybe blogging was never the right medium for you in the first place. Although, that said, most of the early blogs (or link-logs) tended to have short, snappy updates.

But there’s a more fundamental difference between posting to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+, and posting to your own blog. Unless you’re using a hosted service, your blog belongs to you. I’m not talking about ownership in the sense of copyright—I’m sure all those other services have T and Cs that make sure you retain to the rights to what you write. I’m talking about owning the URLs.

Scott puts it best when he writes Your words are wasted:

You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

He’s absolutely right. Over a long enough time period, all third-party services will let you down. There was a time when Friendster was too big to fail. There was a time when it wasn’t possible to imagine a web without Geocities. I’ve been burned by Pownce. Magnolia.

When Delicious was going to be “sunsetted” by Yahoo, a lot of people moved to Pinboard, a service that distinguishes itself by having the shocking business model of actually charging for use. That’s good, and it certainly increases its longevity, but it’s still somebody else’s domain. I decided to move my bookmarks over to my own site.

Now that there is much discontent around Twitter’s ongoing metamorphosis into yet another ad-driven media company, people are moving to App.net, a platform that you pay for and whose Alpha service looks a lot like Twitter without the bad parts. But it’s. Still. Somebody. Else’s. Domain.

I suspect that some of the recent blog-handwringing and blog-soul-searching was prompted by the launch of Medium, an intriguing service that seems to be making lack of ownership into a feature rather than a bug. Instead of your words being defined by you, the author, they are subsumed into the collective and defined by their subject matter instead.

That doesn’t appeal to me, but if this feature request from Dave Winer were implemented, I could get behind Medium 100%:

Let me enter the URL of something I write in my own space, and have it appear here as a first class citizen. Indistinguishable to readers from something written here.

I’m a card-carrying Pembertonian. I have no problem with other services syndicating my words but I want to host the canonical copy. That’s what I’m doing with my journal. That’s I’m doing with my links. I’m not doing it with my tweets (unlike Tantek). I’m not doing it with my photos.

That’s the one that worries me the most. I have over 14,000 pictures on Flickr (I keep offline backups, of course). I pay Flickr and that’s a good thing. But it’s still only a matter of time before Flickr goes the way of other Yahoo properties.

Last year I went to IndieWebCamp in Portland to brainstorm and hack with like-minded people who want to be homesteaders instead of sharecroppers. It was an excellent gathering. And now it’s going to happen again, but this time it’s happening in Brighton.

Two days after dConstruct—and one day after Brighton Mini Maker Faire—we’ll gather at The Skiff for a mishmash of BarCamping and Hackdaying.

You should come. Add yourself to the guest list and the Lanyrd page.

I’ll see you there.

I awoke on my final morning in Florida to find that Jeffrey had written some kind words about a post of mine on responsive design. He also tweeted the link which prompted many questions and comments on Twitter.

I didn’t respond to them.

I have written about responsive web design here in my journal and I’m sure I will have much, much more to say on the matter. But this kind of subject—the sort that requires nuanced, thoughtful discussion—is completely unsuited to Twitter. If anything, Twitter’s tendency (or “twendency”, if you will …’sokay—I just punched myself in the face for that) is to reduce more complex discussion down into simplified soundbites and Boolean values.

Personally, I still get the most value from Twitter when I treat it as a sort of micro-journal, much as I did when I first started using it four and a half years ago. I like Twitter, but it is definitely not the best platform for every kind of online discourse.

This has prompted a call-to-arms from Chris Shiflett:

Most conversation has moved from blogs to Twitter, and although Twitter is more active than blogs ever were, there are fewer quality conversations and debates taking place as a result of this transition. I’m hoping you’ll join me in a blog revival.

The Web Standardistas are rallying behind it:

It might just be the call to arms that shifts our priorities slightly, focusing just a little more on the longer, more considered pieces; posts that are more rewarding to write, hopefully more rewarding to read, and conceivably more likely to be curated.

Drew is on board too:

This isn’t a backlash against Twitter, however. There’s room for both — for quick headline thoughts and for more reasoned posts. I think it would be a shame to have only the former and none of the latter. As such, I’ve been making a bit more of an effort to dust off my own blog and to post some of the things I would normally just tweet.

So is Jon:

The real banquets are blog posts, though. I’ve learnt more from them in the last ten years than I ever will from 140 characters. That’s why blogs are something to be treasured. Blogs and RSS may be dead according to some, but I like that I disagree.

I’m very happy to see my friends and peers make a concerted effort to return to long(er) form writing.

Some of us never stopped.

If you’d like to debate and discuss responsive web design or anything else, I encourage you to take the time to write a blog post. It doesn’t have to be very long, but it’ll probably require more than 140 characters.

The always-brilliant Tom Taylor, prompted by the incessant peanut-gallery criticism from Da Meedja, wrote You’ve either shipped, or you haven’t:

You’ve either poured weeks, months or even years of your life into bringing a product or a service into the world, or you haven’t.

He finishes with:

And the next time someone produces an antenna with a weak spot, or a sticky accelerator, you’re more likely to feel their pain, listen to their words and trust their actions than the braying media who have never shipped anything in their lives.

Bobbie took issue with that last point and wrote Shipping news:

I’d suggest the opposite is in fact the case: the trouble is that media ships constantly, and therefore becomes inured to the difficulties and delicacies of launching a product of any size or scale.

It’s an excellent point, which Tom readily concedes.

Finally, Paul Ford wrote Real Editors Ship:

People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people “no.” Saying “no” is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials—words, sounds, images—mill them to approved tolerances, and ship.

It’s a rather spiffing conversation and it’s fascinating to see the ideas get bounced around from blog to blog. Notice that none of those blogs allow comments. I’m pretty sure that if they did have comments, the resulting conversation wouldn’t have been nearly as good. As I’ve said before:

I don’t think we should be looking at comments to see conversations. It isn’t much of a conversation when the same person determines the subject matter of every dialogue. The best online conversations I’ve seen have been blog to blog: somebody posts something on their blog; somebody else feels compelled to respond on their own blog. The quality of such a response is nearly always better than a comment on the originating blog for the simple reason that people care more about what appears on their own site than on someone else’s.

But how can we keep track of the conversation? I hear you cry.

I don’t think there’s any one particular technological solution to that problem but the combination of RSS, Delicious, Twitter and other linking tools seem to be doing a pretty decent job. If you dig down deep enough, they’re all using the same fundamental technology: the a element and the href attribute.

It’s messy and it’s chaotic but it’s also elegant …because it works. Seeing these kinds of distributed conversations makes me very happy indeed that Tim Berners-Lee shipped his product.

The RSS vine is humming with point and counterpoint this week.

Adobe revealed their new range of icons, based on mashing up a colour wheel with the periodic table of the elements. Lots of people don’t like ‘em: Stan doesn’t; Dave doesn’t. Some people do like ‘em: Veerle does. I can’t say I’m all that keen on them but I honestly can’t muster up much strength of conviction either way.

Let us leave the designers for a moment and cast our gaze upon the hot topic amongst the techy crowd…

Dave Winer looked at JSON and didn’t like what he saw:

Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.

James Bennet wrote an excellent response:

Of course, this ignores the fact that the Lisp folks have been making the same argument for years, wondering why there was this great pressing need to go out and invent XML when s-expressions were just dandy.

The debate continues over on Scripting.com, where the best comment comes from Douglas Crockford:

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

The discussion continues. Be it icons or data formats, the discourse remains remarkably civil. Perhaps it’s the seasonal spirit of goodwill. Whatever happened to the good ol’ “Mac vs. Windows”-style flame wars?

In contrast, Roger has posted a refreshingly curmudgeonesque list entitled Six things that suck about the Web in 2006. He had me nodding my head in vigourous agreement with point number six:

Over-wide, fixed width layouts. Go wide if you must. Use a fixed width if you don’t know how to make a flexible layout. But don’t do both. Horizontal scrolling, no thanks.

Perhaps I should post my own list of things about the Web that suck, but I fear it would be a never-ending roster. Instead I’ll restrict myself to one single thing, specifically related to blogs:

Ads on blogs. They suck. I find them disrespectful; like going into somebody’s house for a nice cup of tea only to have them try to flog you a nice set of encyclopedias.

Just to be clear: ads on commercial sites (magazines, resources, whatever) I understand. But on a personal site, they bring down the tone far more than any use of typography, colour or layout could ever offset.

I used to wonder why people put those “Digg this” or “Delicious this” links on their blog posts. I couldn’t see the point. But combined with google ads, I guess they make sense. They’re a way of driving traffic, eyeballs, click-through and by extension, filthy lucre. That’s fine… as long as you don’t mind being a whore.

Remember the term “Cam whore?”:

A Cam whore is a term for people who expose themselves on the Internet with webcam software in exchange for goods, usually via enticing viewers to purchase items on their wishlists or add to their online accounts.

I think it’s high time we coined the term “Blog whore” to describe people who slap google ads all over a medium intended for personal expression.

Alas, most of my friends, colleagues and co-workers are Blog whores. Scrivs manages to be Blog whore, Digg whore and pimp all at the same time with his 9 Rules bitches. In his recent round-up of blog designs, he says of Shaun’s site:

In a perfect world there are no ads, but we don’t live in that kind of world yet for the time being we can escape to the land of make believe when visiting Inman’s site.

Well, I see no reason why we can’t all live in that perfect world. In the style of Robert’s ludicrously provocative hyperbole, I hereby declare that a blog with ads isn’t really a blog. So there.

Ah, that’s better. There’s nothing like a good rant to counteract all that civilised discourse.

Happy holidays, Blog whores!

Right before I set off on my antipodean adventure, hell froze over and I opened up comments. There was a twist, of course. I wanted to solicit feedback but discourage conversation so, to foster independence of opinion, comments were not immediately published. Instead, all the comments were published together once the ability to add comments had been switched off. In this case, that was a period of one week.

The post received quite a few comments, some more interesting than others.

Quite a few people were sidetracked by the issue of spam and assumed that I would simply be inundated with comment spam. Spam was something I deliberately didn’t mention in the original post as it is tangential to the matter at hand. As it happens, the Akismet API — which I’m using to filter comments — does a great job of keeping comment spam out.

The original post was prompted by Mike mentioning the lack of comments on my site at the Future of Web Apps summit. The audio of Mike’s talk is now available and I highly recommend you listen to it. It’s an excellent presentation chock full of ideas about community, participation and social interaction. Mike also weighed in on my post, saying:

In my view, comments can significantly raise the quality of experience on most sites but cannot significantly lower it.

Now, this is interesting because I disagree almost 100%. In my experience, coming across pointless, lame, nasty or redundant comments attached to a blog post can lower the quality of the document as a whole. I think Mike has managed to crystalise why others are willing to put up with the downsides of comments, while I find the trade-off unacceptable.

Bradley Wright says:

I’m curious as to how comments that no one else can see will foster good feedback.

Well, that goes back to the whole wisdom of crowds thing I was talking about: independence is one of the defining factors.

He continues:

Sometimes the best leaps I’ve seen in online “conversations” come from the back and forth, which is helpful for some people to help crystallise their thoughts.

I agree. But I haven’t found those conversations happening very often in comments. Instead, I find them happening blog to blog. People tend to post more well-thought responses on their own blogs than they do in the comments to someone else’s blog post.

Guy Carberry brings up an important issue:

I have got some very useful information from the comments of a post.

This is true. This is also something that Andy said to me when we were discussing blogs and comments. Well, with my system of comments, this will still be true. Once comments are displayed, there is a greater chance that they will contain only useful information rather than a mixture of information and conversation. The google dance usually takes a while anyway, so if someone is looking for information on a topic and they end up at one of my blog posts, the ability to add comments will probably be disabled and all comments will be displayed. That person gets the information in the original post along with any feedback sent in via a comment. In fact, I would argue that my comment system will prove more valuable for long-term information search.

But how long is long? For how long should the ability to add a comment be available? For the inaugural post, I chose one week. I figured that would be a nice length of time to allow everyone to have their say. As it turned out, the vast majority of comments were submitted in the first few days. Clearly, a week is a long time on the web. I think two to four days might be a better length of time to keep the comment form available.

Pete Lambert commented on the need for some way of tracking when comments get published:

My only issue with it is that I would have to remember to come back and check the comments after whatever arbitrary quarantine period you define.

This is clearly something I need to work on. I still think some form of email notification would work best. Another option would be to actually publish the comments in my RSS feed as well as on the site. With a little jiggery-pokery, this could be flagged up as unread in most RSS readers. But this could just end up pissing off the people who don’t care when comments are published.

Here’s another point:

I suspect what you are going to wind up with is a long list of the same comment over and over again.

Surprisingly, this didn’t turn out to be the case. I actually received a fairly wide range of ideas from people.

That’s not crowd wisdom at all. If your blog was a multiple choice quiz, then fine, but it’s not.

That’s a good point: the wisdom of crowds does seem to work best with multiple choice questions (or “guess how much this weighs” questions). I opened up comments on another entry, where I was soliciting opinions on things to do in Melbourne. I personally thought that this would be a better test of my commenting system. The aggregate results should have given me a good independent overview of recommendations.

As is turned out, I shot myself in the foot by

1. restricting the crowd to people who know anything about Melbourne and
2. also encouraging feedback via my contact form.

Still, my point above about the added value of comments via findability still stands: somebody googling for restaurants in Melbourne will not just find my original post, but also the (one) useful comment about places to eat. The fact that the comments was originally hidden during the submission process doesn’t affect the long-term usefulness. I can see the commenting system working well for less tightly focused questions.

Based on the inaugural post with comments, I’m pretty pleased with the results. Clearly I need to work on a better notification system and I also need to figure out the sweet spot of how long to allow comments to be submitted but overall, this little experiment has yielded some pretty tasty fruit.

I was all set to start allowing more comments when I came across a post by Robert Nyman entitled A blog without comments isn’t really a blog.

Oh, brother! Here we go again.

After all these years of trying to define what a blog is, who knew that someone blogging for a year and a half would stumble upon the answer?

Forgive my sarcasm, but I get pretty fed up of being judged based on how I set up my personal site. I said as much in a comment on Robert’s post.

In his post, Robert has this advice for people who don’t have comments enabled:

Then you shouldn’t blog.

At the same time, he claims to love the openness of the web. I’m seeing a disconnect here. In his reply to my comment, Robert says:

I’m glad that I have comments here so everyone can read your and my opinions on this, and also have the possibility to contribute with what they think. That’s what I like about the web: the openness.

That’s a pretty narrow view of openness. I don’t think it’s very open to have all responses in a single document.

Here’s what I like about the web: openness through hypertext. I can link to any resource on the Web and comment on it here on my own website. Conversely, anyone is free to link to this document and comment on it on their own site (or a third-party site like Newsvine). That’s openness. Demanding that everyone post their thoughts together on the originating document is a closed system.

So, just as I was ready to start experimenting more with feedback mechanisms, I’m confronted with a “my way or the highway” ultimatum about what I’m allowed do on my own site. It’s enough to make me give up on the whole idea.

But I won’t. I’ll keep opening up the occasional post for comments, although I’m also really interest in using tags and pings for tracking responses, hence the Del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr links at the end of each post.

I was thinking of opening comments on this very post, but I think most of the salient points have been gathered from the initial post. If you would like to respond to this, you can write a blog post of your own and it will appear through the Technorati link (I really wish Trackback worked better but spam has effectively killed that off). If you have any feedback, there’s always email and IM.