No Comment
This site does not have a way for readers to post comments under each article. And I plan not to implement a comment section. Instead, now Parallel Transport accepts webmentions, so you can write and publish responses on your own place on the web and link it back to the original article here. In fact this very article appears as a response on Jeremy Keith’s post.
Comments & Feedback
Most comments are useless. They do not contribute much to the original content. They’re mostly one-line quips about liking or disliking the post. No context, no feedback, no thought. Having a comment form makes it very easy to post a random comment on some website. Combine that with the anonymity it affords, comment sections are breeding grounds for trolls, unconstructive arguments, flaming, name-calling, and shouting matches. No wonder the bottom-half of the internet is so despised.
Second; why this expectation that every blog must be a discussion forum? Public discussions can be had on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+.
If you really have some response to what I write, you can use email or catch me on one of the aforementioned social site places. Or better yet, write your own post about it on your own blog, site, journal, social-network-thingie!
You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response.
If your response, adds something of value to the original content, I’ll post it here. I have transfered many such valued comments over from my old blog. Not all of them agreed with what I had to say, but they were considered responses, instead of just ‘I like it!’ or ‘This is shit!’.
Webmention
So suppose you have published a response on your own site. Webmention is a way to notify me of your response. You send the URL of your response along with the URL of my original article as a POST request to my web server. My server verifies that the response post exists and that it links to the original article.
Now, I can do something with your response. I could simply link to it below my article, or repost your entire response. I have chosen to take a middle-ground and display a little snippet with a nice link back to your original post. If all goes well, you would have responded to my article with one of your own, published on your own site, and still have a discussion that links back and forth.
Since, most web-publishing platforms don’t support sending mentions automatically, following Jeremy Keith, I have a small form at the bottom of every article that you can use to send me the link to your response post.
If you are interested in the details of how this works, take a look at the webmention spec, and the informative discussion at the IndieWeb. If, like me, you use and love Python, Panayotis Vryonis has written a good tool to handle webmentions. You can also see my own webmention code, which extends Vryonis’ webmentiontools to do a few more things. Feel free to make suggestions, test, extend and use it. And if you do, let me know. Or better yet, write about it and link it back here!
