The return of the blogroll (and more)

When I completely redesigned this site in September/October of this year I spent a lot of time thinking about this blog section - not just in terms of design and layout, but also about how it needed to work best for me and also for people who read it, like you.

Part of that is functionality - so for example you can automatically get emails of new blog posts when they’re published, share posts online using the buttons at the bottom of the post, and so on.

And part of that is understanding what I want to get out of writing a blog, some of which is breaking out of the walled gardens of social media.

This isn’t a I must blog more frequently post because I already blog at a frequency I’m happy with, which for me is between one and four posts per month, and I’ve been doing that for years.

It’s more about making it easier for people to read and engage with this blog, and at this point I need to point out that it’s not about pursuing clicks and pageviews — I deliberately deleted Google Analytics as part of the site redesign so I was free of any urge to be part of that game — but about genuine engagement and building communities.

So I’ve been making some changes. Some of these I’ve been doing for years, and some are new developments:

1. Quoting other people’s blog posts that I like (and linking to them), and constructively engaging with what they have posted when it ties in with the post I’m writing,
2. Making sure that I send WebMentions or XML-RPC pingbacks whenever I mention someone else’s blog in a post (if this is all tech gobbledigook to you then don’t worry - these are “on” by default in popular blogging platforms like WordPress, and just automatically let another site know if you’ve mentioned them in a blog post),
3. Making sure my blog is set up to receive other people’s WebMentions or XML-RPC pingbacks (again, if this is gobbledigook to you then don’t worry - these are “on” by default in popular blogging platforms like WordPress) if someone links in their blog to a blog post I’ve written so that I can see what they’ve said and respond if I choose,
4. Actively adding new blogs (or, at least, sites with RSS feeds) to my RSS Feed Reader to make sure that I have an active influx of new ideas and concepts to keep me fresh with new ideas or interpretations,
5. Adding an old-fashioned blogroll to my blog because it’s not all about me, but about building communities and explicitly citing your sources, influences, and wider idea-network melting-pot (even if they’re not direct sources for any specific blog post) - you should find this towards the bottom of the left column (on desktop or tablet) or at the bottom (on mobile) of my main blog page.

I’m sorry if this sounds dangerously like a manifesto - it was never intended as such, but I can see the similarities!

As I said, some of these are things I’ve been doing without explicitly thinking about them for years, but my awareness of my approach has been sharpened by reading Kening Zhu’s post build a world, not an audience that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, and in some online conversations following that.

I am taking a similar but also slightly different approach to that which Kening describes.

As per her blog post, this website certainly exists — first and primarily — for itself (and, by extension, for me), but it’s important to me that it is also designed to easily integrate with a much wider community, as I wrote about in my blog post Standalone but interconnected, independent but not isolated back in October.

RSS Feeds, Webmentions/XML-RPC, ‘get blog posts by email’ functionality, and so on are all intrinsic parts of a site that is open to being part of a community.

Integrating the ActivityPub protocol — which is used by Mastodon, PixelFed, microblog.pub, Plume, et al. — on this blog (and, separately, for my artwork) is another future plan to provide different ways for this site to seamlessly be part of a wider community.

But there’s an elephant in the room that needs addressing: comments.

Over the years I’ve had a few different comments systems on this blog, and I’ve always spent most of my time using them to block and delete spam & trolls, or worrying about the privacy issue of third-party plugins.

And I also considered the real-world experience: even when people could leave a comment under the post most people instead tended to post a link to the article on social media with a few words of their own.

Additionally, traditional blog comments systems create another walled garden - this site (if I implement them myself, or the comments site if I use a plugin such as Disqus), and I don't want any walled gardens.

So when I launched this new version of the website I didn’t bother with a comments system.

When/if I have the ActivityPub integration done then that will provide some commenting functionality (but the comments will be owned by the commenter, e.g. hosted on their own Mastodon instance).

I may also look into displaying any WebMentions and pingbacks if someone has responded to a blog post I’ve written, but I don’t see any good reason to implement a traditional blog comments system.

I’ll probably think of other tweaks I can make as time goes by, and as new ideas, technologies, and protocols emerge.