Like. Comment. Subscribe.
That’s what the YouTubers say isn’t it?
I miss folks commenting on blog posts really. At my peak I’d post a blog post at home, walk the half a mile from my student digs to university, and then be greeted with 4 or 5 comments. Now? I think I’ve had one comment in the past year. I still don’t stubbornly take the comments off here nor Dwi’n Rhys though, in a vain hope they come back. They won’t. But they may.
But seemingly like half the attendees at LoopConf last week in London (read Tim Nash’s post about his ridiculous schedule from Yorkshire > London > Poland to be at events), I too was inspired by Ana Rodrigues’ talk “Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence”, who had a number of inspiring slides, including the one I’ve used as the header image (albeit with a terrible photo :-
Personal websites are the perfect playground for experimentation. They afford a space to explore new technologies that might not yet be suitable for professional projects and a safe space to fail.
Ana Rodrigues – “In defence of unpolished personal websites“
So consider me inspired, and me testing more things that may fail. I’ve switched on Webmentions using this plugin, and also using Autoblue as well to try and foster some more comments from BlueSky (this post should automatically post there and also automatically pull in replies as comments). It may work. It may be utter rubbish. But we try.
It’s the first strand of things to do. I want to promote this blog to all the things. I want to take this blog back to the 00’s. I want to put 88×31 buttons on. I was bored on Sunday made a few because James Huff on the Post Status Slack wanted a retro button and the ones on the Web Archive were terrible. I want under-construction GIFs. I want to use my new found Aseprite skills to make this blog look a little less like the blog of a 41 year old business owner who renewed his home insurance today, and more of the bloke in his early 20’s who spend his evenings drawing little graphics, installing ridiculously unsafe PHP scripts, and generally having a good life online. Granted less of the PHP scripts, but more moving purposefully and breaking things.
Like. Comment. Subscribe.
The last comment I have on my own site, before I disabled them was a death threat, because the company I had worked at had turned off their site. The comment came on a post about me leaving the company.
You are an awesome human, who deserves awesome comments on your posts.
I’m not sure I can bring myself to the barrage of negative comments, spam. There has to be a middle ground that is not the technical issues webmention have of being almost unusable for most people.
Yeah that’s true. Sorry you got to experience that. People are the worst š (not you, you’re the best mind!). I must admit I tend to get negative comments elsewhere **waves at Reddit**, but nothing like that. Hope you were able to take action.
Webmentions isn’t ideal, yes. And yeah encouraging comments in such a way that isn’t in a centralised place farming content would be great. Hopefully some middle ground manifests itself!
I too refuse to disable comments. It feels like giving up.
I know right? It’ll feel like Reddit/etc would have won then!