Open Season

By Evan — — Tech

Up until four days ago, I had been buying maybe three albums a year at best. But then I downloaded iTunes 4, complete with the unobtrusive little “Music Store” button in the corner. Now it’s open season. So far I’ve bought about six or seven albums worth of music in four days. This constitutes an increase in my rate of buying music of roughly 17,000%. (Ahh, extrapolation.)

So in light of that, it’s a good thing I have a new writing contract. I have to say that I’m quite pleased with my current employers. When I arrived at work on the first morning, not only did I have a phone number and a valid email address, not only could I connect to the web and the intranet, but I could even see printers out on the network. But wait, there’s more… when I opened my desk drawer, I discovered that they had given me a Swingline stapler. Not a red Swingline stapler, but a Swingline stapler nonetheless. It doesn’t get much better than this, folks.

Anyway, in other news: I’ve decided to open up comments on this journal. Here’s why. In the discussion on Jacques Distler’s weblog about my earlier post about XHTML standards compliance, Phil Ringnalda had some thoughtful comments about the worthiness of my “Test #3”, comments that I need to factor in to my thinking. But Phil also commented:

“I wonder how long it will be before those of us with comments enabled think twice about linking to a weblog post without comments, knowing that we will become the comment host for that entry, for our readers.”

For a long time, I’ve specifically disallowed comments on this journal. Partly because I’ve never viewed this site as a “public forum”. Partly because it could end up being a PITA to spend time squashing spam and hateful/racist comments. But mostly because there is nothing sadder than seeing a journal with post after post ending with “Comments (0)”. This is not really a problem for the Alphas, but for the rest of us… well, web logging is self-indulgent enough. We might as well not call attention to the fact that we are shouting out into the wilderness.

Despite all that, Phil has a point. I posted a piece that lends itself to discussion — and I didn’t provide any communications facility other than emailing me directly. This barrier was too high, which is really too bad. I’ve read Phil Ringnalda in the past, and I consider him to be one of the Alphas who really has put some serious thought into standards and their implementation on his site. Not to mention that my thinking certainly hasn’t crystallized on these MIME-type issues yet. So perhaps I missed an opportunity for an educational discussion — if so, that was a blown call.

Thus, an experiment: comments are now open on all subsequent posts. (And on the XHTML 100.) If they turn out to be more trouble than they’re worth, or if nobody is bothering to enter any, I’ll just end the experiment. (Of course, this doesn’t preclude me from padding the numbers by starting arguments with myself.)

14 thoughts on “Open Season”

  2. And I thought, “I bet the entire comment consists of Evan saying, ‘Like this!'” Like I said, the unfairy blogmother knows all, sees all, tries to forget much.

  4. Well, *I* think that having Comments is half the fun of having a blog (would be 3/4 if I had more traffic).

    I think you need a narrower comment-entry box, though (or a wider popup window). This one has a most annoying horizontal scroll-bar.

  5. I have to say that I skipped most of the XHTML logs. That doens’t make me a bad person, just someone who enjoys the stories about losing/winning at poker more.

    Here’s a question: Which has more relevance to it’s given medium: Letters to the editor in daily newspapers or blog comments? I always think o letters to editors as mini-articles for the laypeople who can’t write – or as a way to let the masses vent without really validating their opinions.

    What a second, is there a word limit on these comment things?

    Btw, I think it’s cheating that at the time I posted, HALF the comments were from the webmaster.
    webmaster.

  6. I’d say the major difference between letters to the editor and blog comments is that blog comments can also be teasing/snarking/totally off-topic. Newspaper editors are unlikely to print a letter that reads, “I like cheese. Signed, Bob.” But someone could easily post that in the comments to a blog, and most bloggers don’t control their comments sections rigidly enough to remove it. Also, very few newspaper editors would run a really entertaining letter that ran several pages, but with blogging the sky’s the limit, as long as you don’t violate the blogger’s chosen rules.

    I don’t think of mine as a blog, but more as a journal. I often end up posting about what I’m up to/reading/working on, and while I welcome private discussions about my personal affairs, I don’t really care to police public discussions of same. So for me, e-mail from journal readers is half the fun. And I get goodly plenty of that.

  7. I’m not sure exactly what this means, but I not only hosted a comment thread about liking cheese, I then pointed to it approvingly from another post.

    Comments on a journal? Other than in something like LiveJournal, where you can control who sees what and who comments on what, that would be scary. But comments on a weblog? They are the only reason I keep doing it. I already know what I know. The only reason I post it in public is to see what other people know, especially if it turns out that they know I’m wrong.

    The dreaded Comments (0): I remember it well. But, there’s really no need for it. Comment counts are just a leftover from times when we had no choice: comment systems didn’t email the author new comments, so he had to memorize the counts for every entry to spot new comments, and there wasn’t any way to put “recent comments” in the sidebar or do a comment RSS feed for readers. If you get too many zeros (unlikely, though it’s possible to write a good weblog that just doesn’t lend itself to commenting), just rip the count out and put in something better. One I really like is Robert K. Brown’s http://www.robertkbrown.com/2003/02/20/how_to_improve_comment_visibility.html trick to display the names of comment authors, linked to comments, with the first n words in the link title (you’ll need to go back to his main page to see it in action).

  8. Jacques: I hate horizontal scrollbars too. Unfortunately, I’m looking at the popup in Safari, Mozilla, and IE5, and I’m just not seeing it. So I just took a stab in the dark and increased the width by about 15%. Did that help, or not? I can’t tell from over here.

    Adiv: 1) See M’ris’s comment. 2) More poker stories coming soon. 3) How can I possibly maintain my extraordinarily high self-posting ratio if you keep messing things up by adding your comments?

    Phil: Hello! I didn’t know about the historical reasons for the comment count — quite interesting. Well, it’s clear that if I keep comments enabled, I’ll have to do a lot more thinking about how to refine the comments system and do a better job integrating it with my site. For now I just slapped it up with only enough customization to make it vaguely resemble my main template. Anyway, I’ve read Robert’s page and I’ve bookmarked it for future reference. Thanks much!

  9. Better, but still no cigar. The comment entry box still overflows the #main div by maybe 20px or so.

    Phil also posted an extra-long URL in his comment, which even-further overflows the #main div.

    I’m curious that you see something radically different. I am using Mozilla 1.4b/MacOSX.

  11. I always figured you did, Mark.

    Jacques — I’m using Mozilla 1.3, haven’t gotten around to getting 1.4b. Anyway, here’s another attempt at a quick fix — I’ve added fifty more pixels to the width. Did that help? If not, I’ll probably need to start digging into my style sheets. They’re probably doing something funky with the layout. Sigh.

  13. I like cheese, but usually only when it melts like in lasagna. Well, I do like the really soft chesses like labbaneh and cream cheese, but the crumbly stuff like feta is not to my taste.

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