I love my RSS reader. It’s the first thing I reach for when I’m “catching up.” As I’m reading through my list of feed items, I often come across blog posts that do not give me any
way to interact with the post!
Here are some options in the order of my own preferences.
Webmentions
…
Reply email link directly in feed
…
Reply email link at the bottom of your post
…
Social media links to the blog post
…
Contact page or form
…
I’m with Michael… mostly. And I try to follow all of his suggestions and more here on my site. Let’s break it down from Mike’s list:
✅ Webmentions are fantastic. It’s been a long journey to get there: we had trackbacks. Then we had pingbacks. And now we’ve got webmentions. Each an improvement upon
the last. I support all three. (If everything works properly, this post should result in a webmention being sent to Mike so he’ll know about this comment, even though I wrote it
on my blog, and it’ll appear as a comment or at least a link on his blog). Webmentions are magical.
❌ Reply email links in feeds is an interesting idea. I don’t currently do this. Except on this post, where I have, experimentally! While I’m a big fan of
reducing the barriers to engagement, I figure it’s acceptable to expect people to click-through to see their contact options, so long as you’re already supporting Webmentions. Maybe
I’ll add these in a future iteration.
✅ Reply email link at the bottom of your post – yup, I do this every single time. I use dynamically-generated email addresses per-post (mixed in with some hidden
honeypots) as an anti-spam mechanism, as well as to help me work out what something was a reply to (it’s sometimes pretty ambiguous: I don’t know why, but often people
will email me about years- or decades-old blog posts and not specify what post it was, as if I’d written them just this morning and they were fresh in my mind!).
🤷 Social media links to the blog post: I mean… kinda. I don’t do much in the way of centralised social media, but I automatically push a summary to the
Fediverse at @blog@danq.me and selectively push via my personal account @dan@danq.me too. And occasionally
others. They get tucked-away in a <details> called “syndications”. I’ll get around to connecting to Bubbles eventually, although
only my articles and not e.g. replies like this make it to Bubbles, because apparently I’m too high-traffic for Bubbles otherwise (!). Someday I’d like to
negotiate something a bit better with them, e.g. all of my articles plus anything else I specifically choose so I can include Bubbles-targetting replies like
this!
✅ Contact page or form – I use both, assuming “form” here means a comments form.
Mike’s list is, of course, incomplete. Here’s a few options Mike hasn’t listed, and I think are worthy of mention:
🦛 Reactions – I use “reactions” to enable ultra-low-effort engagement for people who just want to say “hey, I read this”
without doing anything more. Look at the bottom of this post on my blog and you’ll see that you can click on, say, a thumbs up, or a star, or… a hippopotamus?… icon to give me some
feedback. Other people use other kinds of reaction/heart buttons: e.g. Bear Blog comes with one built-in, and there are third-party services that are basically like
hit-counters but on-click.
✍️ Guestbooks – I don’t have one of these, but I’m considering it. They’re properly retro, and they’re more about responding publicly
to a whole site than a specific post… but sometimes that’s a thing that a person wants to do!
✉️ Postal mail? Yes, really! For almost a year now I’ve been encouraging people to send physical mail postcards to by
blog! Right now you have to click-through to my contact page for the details, but in a future version of my blog the postal address will be right there next to the comment form.
I’m sure there are others too, but I just wanted to look at Mike’s list, compare it to my features, and think a bit outside the box to boot.
Ruth, JTA, the kids and I are all back in the UK1
after a three week period during which some or all of us were consistently in Spain. The whole adventure was the kind of masterpiece of epic planning that only Ruth could have pulled
off, and it worked spectacularly2.
I wasn’t around for the first week of the trip, but continued working from home (with the dog, pictured) as per the usual.
San Sebastián
Through clever permutations of remote-working from overseas (mostly by Ruth) and overlapping/intersecting stretches of annual leave (mostly by JTA and I), we were able to avoid having
to send the dog to the dogsitter for a block of more than a single week3,
didn’t need to break the bank on our collective leave budgets, and managed to give the kids the longest possible block of continuous immersion in the language and culture of Spain.
The one time I tried surfing, I wasn’t good at it, but I was reassured that was normal for a first day. The kids disproved that theory,
becoming pretty reasonable boarders very quickly.
In the first week (when I wasn’t there), the kids got to take a mixture of surfing classes and Spanish language lessons in San Sebastián, among other activities. The Bordeaux wildfires caused some travel chaos for the others getting there, but they made it work in the end.
Tarragona
Later, I flew out to meet up with them and we switched to the opposite coast of Spain, staying in a delightful little
villa North of Tarragona. The summer heatwaves that are affecting the continent made the middle of the day especially
oppressive, so we did as the locals do and sensibly sheltered indoors during the hottest part of the day… but the kids in particular were glad to be able to take a dip in the pool to
cool off.
The villa was a lovely building in a fabulous spot, nestled among hillside olive groves and vineyards, but the lack of wired Internet
access/WiFi plus the signal-blocking stone walls made it more “disconnected” than we’d anticipated4!
As has become my tradition when travelling and on family holidays – because I’m an earlier riser than most, but also because I wanted to make the most of the coolest part of the day – I
got out early most days for a whole bunch of geocaching expeditions5.
But once others were awake we found plenty of other opportunities to explore the area.
Parc Samà‘s breezy towers and water features took some of the heat out of the day, when we visited its attractive botanic gardens.
Having come from, remarkably, a similar level of temperature and humidity in the UK, I was interested to see how much greener everything was here on the Mediterranean
coast. The plants here, better-adapted to hot and dry summers than those that we plant on our little island, were clearly more-suited to these kinds of conditions. Is it perhaps time
that Britain started ditching her lawns and other year-round thirsty vegetation… instead planting more tropical-adjacent plants to provide shade (and carbon capture!) as the climate
continues to shift?
This little fella had the right idea about keeping cool.
I enjoyed that we were able to split out time between a diversity of activities. A week-long jaunt can be dominated by a single activity – a skiing holiday, for example – but by the
time you’re spending most of a month exploring a country, you want to be able to mix things up a bit, right?
Sometimes we kept it slow-paced and relaxing, like reading by the pool while the children invent splashing-based games or playing board games in the shade. Other times we explored
history and culture, like our visit to the Ferreres Aqueduct, the Catedral de Tarragona, or the old Roman amphitheatre.
An augmented reality tour of the amphitheatre was both engaging and educational for the kids, bringing to life its long and complex history: did you know it started as an
amphitheatre, but later was the ground of a church (commemorating Saint Fructuosus, who was executed there), then
became a prison, and now… it’s an amphitheatre again: in addition to being a historical monument it’s used to stage concerts and things!
And other times still we even did the typical “British tourist in Spain” things, like a trip to the beach or an expedition out on a catamaran to swim in the sea while the sun set.
I expected the catamaran trip to be a bit tacky, but it was actually lush. (I may have availed myself of the open bar, a bit!)
Obviously the biggest reason for our trip was to catch sight of the total solar eclipse as it passed over the region, and our villa’s garden/vineyard was without a doubt a superlative
spot for this. We’d initially been concerned that visibility of the low-in-the-sky/close to sunset eclipse might be obstructed by the hills and that, therefore, we’d need to find
another spot from which to spectate, but an early-in-the-week experiment of watching the sunset (with an eye on the clock) reassured us that this wasn’t the case. So – as long as we
were lucky with the cloud cover – we should be set.
A particular highlight of the entire trip was hanging out as a family in our private vineyard, watching the solar eclipse.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have had great visibility of a total solar eclipse once before, in 1999, but honestly: this one beat
it. The perfect location, the reds of the setting sun, the “moon illusion” exaggerating the perceived size of the moon as it
approached the sun, the joy of vicariously sharing in the childrens’ wonder… all of these made the whole experience pretty mind-blowing.
You’ve seen pictures of eclipses before, but this one is mine. I maintain that even the good/professional photographs are poor substitutes for the real experience, though!
We watched, we awed, and then we saw the still half-obscured sun gradually disappear over the horizon. And then, a round of hugs and cheers and conversation later, we sat up late to
enjoy the Perseids begin their nocturnal display.
Mostly I was looking at the sky (through the safety of my eclipse glasses, of course). But I managed to snap a handful of photographs that, despite the limitations of my phone’s
camera, came out pretty well.
PortAventura
After our week in the villa we delivered JTA to the airport to return home. Then Ruth, the kids and I drove on to PortAventura, perhaps
our favourite theme park anywhere in the world. Since our last visit, the younger kid has reached a milestone of height that permits him to ride all of the largest rides, and he was
excited to take advantage of this newfound privilege.
A particularly useful thing about PortAventura compared to some other theme parks is that it’s designed with heatwaves in mind: it’s got lots of natural shade, cooling-off
areas, and the right ratio of water rides for when you positively, absolutely need a good soaking.
Both the elder child and I were particularly excited to share with him my favourite non-looping
rollercoaster, Shambhala. Shambhala is simply excellent: it’s a highly-vertical smooth ride with a free and open-feeling restraint that, collectively, give amazing “air”
and a sensation of “flying” that’s hard to compare to almost any other coaster ride I’ve been on. I could sing its praises aplenty.
The second we reached the front of the line for our first ride on Dragon Khan…
it broke down. But we got to watch it being repaired right in front of us, so that’s cute!
Going to Disneyland Paris and PortAventura in the same summer gives me the confidence to say: PortAventura is the better theme park. The rides, the
theming, the food, the queue management, the accommodation, the value-for-money… it’s all better. So if you’re considering a European theme park trip and you don’t
care about getting your photo taken with Goofy or whatever… PortAventura would be my suggestion.
PortAventura’s water park is good too, although it was pretty busy on the day we went. Their 30-metre tall near-vertical waterslide King Khajuna is a little
intimidating7,
but nothing our thrillseeking little man wasn’t up for.
Barcelona
Finally, we made our way to Barcelona for a “wind-down” couple of days at a hotel we’ve always enjoyed there. Aside for being mistaken for staff
while I was using my laptop by the rooftop pool, there’s little of note to say about it: we took it easy, did as little as we could get away with, and generally “unplugged” before
our journey back to the UK and a return to normal life (boo!).
Altogether a fabulous trip… and a really interesting experiment in a model that we could replicate if we ever opted for a three week (but drop-in/drop-out/telework) holiday in future.
Though… I’d again want (our scheduling queen) Ruth to wrangle the logistics, because it gets complicated when there are so many moving parts!
2 For a while, she was talking about trying to engineer it into a five-week
expedition spanning both this and our trip to France earlier in the summer (to which JTA, the kids and I drove/LeShuttle’d, and to which Ruth flew following a work-related
event in Austria: my, what a cosmopolitan life we’re leading this year!). But that’d have been an enormously more-complicated affair and I’m glad we settled on this “simpler” trip in
the end!
3 Not that she cares: the dog loves hanging out with her little doggy friends, and is
always excited to be taken to our dogsitter‘s, where she also “commutes” for a workday or two most weeks.
4 During out post-holiday ‘retro’ (because of course that’s what we do), the lack of connectivity appeared as both a negative
and a positive on some of our lists! Obviously we’re all aware that a little digital disconnection is healthy and valuable, but sometimes it takes being in the middle of
nowhere to impose the requisite self-discipline to keep off your devices!
6 Obviously, the Devil’s Bridge nearest where I used to live and at which Ruth and I spent our first anniversary – back when we had no idea that we’d be able to make our relationship last… what…? 19 years this month!) –
will always have a special place in my heart.
7 Reaching the top of King Khajuna’s tower, you can feel it swap in the breeze, and when
you get to the slide itself its ‘horizon’ disappears precipitously until you shuffle completely up to it, at which point there’s little choice about your destination! While we queued
for our first goes, we witnessed several people reach the top, change their minds, and turn back!
