Re: Please let me interact with your blog post!

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.

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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.