My blog posts have had a "Reply by e-mail" button for years. Some of them also link to other places where you can comment. This has been a nice trade-off: giving people the chance to comment somewhere where others will find it, but not having to manage the comments myself.
I do enjoy reading comments below blog posts, though. It's always enlightening to read something and then have other people's opinions right below.
Starting today1, it's possible to leave comments below my blog posts. There's a small delay, as I have to manually approve every comment. I don't want to be advertising some shady cryptocurrency tomorrow.
(My guestbook has also been migrated from Meadow Guestbooks to the same backend that now serves blog comments.)
When I wrote the new comment code, I also added support for webmentions in addition to the form at the bottom. It was live for about an hour before I removed it. As it happens, Kev Quirk wrote an article about privacy and webmentions while I was testing.
Webmentions (and ActivityPub) cause your message to be copied to other sites, where it could remain even after you've modified or deleted the original. That's how the system works. In my opinion, if you publish something on a public page, it should be considered public and can be expected to stay out there for a long time.2 But it certainly is a point of discussion. Similar issues exist with services like Bridgy that sync messages between social media silos.
That's why I decided to only accept comments that were submitted through a form on the article page. Your comment is published on the exact same page where you wrote it.3 There can't be much discussion about that, right?
While researching how other people and platforms implement comments, I came across Bear Blog. They have this rather simple upvote button. I couldn't find much documentation about it; it seems to be called "toast" or "like" here and there. You don't need an account and you don't even need to leave your contact details. You just push it, and the number goes up.
So while I was adding the required interactivity for comments, I also introduced a similar thumbs up button. If you like a post, you can click it. The number goes up. If you like it more, you can click it again, and the number goes up again! It's not used for anything other than displaying a silly number at the bottom. It does looks nice, though.
I was told blog posts with comments sections need some kind of actionable callout, so: please leave a comment!
Sorry, I lied. The comments section has been live for a few weeks now. It doesn't really matter: nobody reads these posts so nobody noticed. But now it's official! ↩
Comments that have been published on my own website will be removed if the author asks, as explained in my privacy policy. ↩
And it may be copied to hundreds of other places by random internet scrapers, like the Internet Archive. Somehow this is always ignored in discussions about webmentions and activitypub. ↩
Generally speaking, I don't delete content from this site. Having said that, if I posted something that I later feel is particularly egregious, I think I probably would. I personally don't think that a website should be a permanent record - how can it be? Nothing last forever.
This got me thinking about what to do with some of my older articles. I believe that URLs should be stable. The internet is a large place, there’s no way to know who might be linking to any of my webpages. Removing a page may also break other websites: someone may have written about it. Deleting the page would remove the context of their reference.
However, I’ve been working on this website in some form or another since 2007. Technical articles tend to get outdated, and people change their minds about things they’ve written. Some of the articles on this website no longer reflect what I stand for.
Articles older than two years already include a banner noting their age, but that’s not always enough. Nowadays, people often form an opinion based on the title alone — especially on social media. It’s unlikely they’d notice a note about how old the article is.
So I decided to hide certain articles. Hidden articles are no longer linked on my website and don't appear in RSS feeds. You can’t find them by clicking around. But if you already have the link, the content is still accessible. Because, as they say, cool URIs don't change.
]]>Turns out, the new design looks exactly the same as the old one!
A few things did change though:
float to position elements in favor of flexbox.I also tried to get some insight in how people used the website:
Most of the traffic to this website is routed through Cloudflare's CDN. I've configured it to cache everything, which means the access logs on my web server record only part of the actual traffic. This creates an interesting dataset: I can see which pages are most visited, but I can't see spikes due to pages being shared somewhere. For the same reason, my statistics about browsers, operating systems, referring websites and returning visitors are completely skewed.
Articles are the most popular pages on this website. That makes sense, as those tend to show up in searches and are shared more frequently than others. My most popular articles are technical ones:
That means I need to write more articles!
The most common 404s appear to be scanners looking for vulnerabilities.
WordPress related pages like wp-login.php, xmlrpc.php and several files inside the wp-includes directory lead the race, followed by Joomla's administrator directory.
My work to fix broken links (using data from the access logs and Google Search Console) seems to have paid off. I've also been trying not to delete or move pages for a few years now. When a page is no longer relevant, I replace it with a small message pointing people to alternatives, like I did with my OTR fingerprint listing.
Another interesting 404 page is /irc:irc.quakenet.org/sorcix,isnick which seems to be caused by a spider that doesn't understand irc: URLs.
I've been looking into IndieWeb after reading a few blog posts by Jan-Lukas Else. People can reply to your articles by linking back from their own website, or by using one of the provided IndieWeb-compatible services. As I'm not active on mainstream social media, this may be a great way to connect with like-minded people.
Features I want to roll out next: