Euan Semple has begun blogging again (yeah!) and posted how he is enjoying comment on blogs via email.
I am enjoying using email for commenting on other people’s writing rather than commenting on their blogs. I am even using it to pick up on Mastodon posts.
Commenting became a mess when we needed to spend more time moderating spam comments than answering legitimate comments. As a result you’ll see many blogs these days not offering commenting at all1. Euan’s solution has been to email the author directly and it so happens I emailed him to welcome him back to the fold earlier in the week.
When I first started blogging in 20022 here was a mechanism called “pingback”. I can’t remember the exact mechanics but if I wrote a post like this one, the link to Euan’s original post would connect up (pingback) and let him know someone else had written to extend his thoughts. It was a nice way to interact and expand ideas. Think of it as conversations across websites.
Sadly, that system only exists in Wordpress as far as I’m aware.
I’m happy for anyone to contact me via email about what I’ve written. So much so that I’ve added an email link at the bottom of each page. Tomorrow or over the weekend I’ll create something similar for Mastodon and if I can, add something similar to the bottom of posts in the RSS feed as well.