In the earlier days of blogging—and especially before large social media networks took over—much of that occurred in blog comment sections, or pings and trackbacks from others responding to your post in a post of their own. In the more recent Indieweb era, webmentions are being implemented to carry forward this “have a conversation online” mentality.

Unfortunately, facilitating a public discussion via blog posts can be tricky. Comments and pingbacks/trackbacks are easily targeted by spammers, bots, and other shady SEO types. And not all comments are friendly, warranted, on-topic, or at all useful.

And to manage all of these interactions, site owners need to design their site to accept them, which for many of us, can be a huge barrier to implementing them—not to mention moderate the incoming submissions.

And even when there is useful discussion around your post, it may occur elsewhere, whether on social media, or maybe a discussion board, or even in emails or other direct messages—never reaching your site to begin with.

Enter Webnotes

A simple solution to all of this is something I’m calling Webnotes.

Webnotes are found at the end of a blog post or page that reference comments, links, related posts, and any other useful information that was received (or added) after the item was published.

These webnotes are added by the site author manually and can be displayed and organized however you’d like them to be. This keeps the site author in control of what is displayed on their own website, while still acknowledging useful comments and directing readers to other places where they can find out more.

And because webnotes are not semi-automated processes like comments and webmentions, you can avoid bots, spammers, and trolls—and use simpler website technologies, too. You can easily implement webnotes on any website platform, and you need absolutely no additional knowledge or skills to do so.

Since you decide what is important to add and what isn’t, you can avoid some of the nice-but-mostly-useless stuff—like a comment saying “great post!” or a trackback link from someone’s linkblog or a social media thread that goes wildly off-topic—that can clutter things up without adding any value.

Instead, webnotes simply highlight whatever is useful and additive, and nothing more.

Another thing that I like about the webnotes method is that it allows for conversation to occur anywhere, and still be included with the post.

Maybe that’s an additional piece of information that was provided by email. Or a link to someone else’s own post about the topic that provides a different point of view. Or a relevant resource that you were subsequently alerted to. You can pull in quotes from wherever you’d like, and display them however you’d like too. You can even paraphrase a comment to make it more understandable if you’d like. You can attribute a quote, or not attribute it if that’s more appropriate. It’s your site, after all.

In particular, webnotes are great for email conversations—which is one of my favorite ways of interacting with posts, as they tend to be far more thoughtful and useful than simple social media comments. And since we all have email, it’s an easy way to gather comments and additional resources, simply by providing a contact form or email link after each post.

The downside is, of course, that it requires the site author to add these webnotes manually.

But that friction is, in my mind, good friction to have. It weeds out the chaff, ignores the useless, and is blind to the petty. It respects the reader. And it’s easier to do than you think.

Webnotes

Here’s an example of webnotes on my last post on Using Text Replacements, where I added a link to someone else’s blog post that offered an additional use I hadn’t included in my original post.

Jedda is doing something similar on her website, calling them Community Echoes.

The post Webnotes: a simple replacement for comments, pingbacks, and webmentions appeared first on rscottjones.

Here’s what I’ve got.

My main site is rscottjones.com, and that’s where I’ve tried to keep all the action. That’s my permadomain. It’s an old WordPress install that’s undergone numerous…we’ll call them “eras.” A personal blog for the longest time, then focused on travel, then posts merged in from a separate travel blog I wrote for awhile, now moving back towards a more personal feel.

But, of course, the design sucks and the plugins I used to build it have expired. I’m due for a total overhaul, but I’m stuck on how comprehensive I want it to be, and if WP is still the right choice.

Then I have my “public notes” site, which is an Obsidian Publish site at rscottjon.es. I had expected to really build this out (in part to avoid my main site mess!), but life got busy and I wonder if this sort of thing shouldn’t just live on my main site anyway.

I then decided to try micro.blog, which is over at rsjon.es. The original idea there was to share fun links, like we all did back in the day. I originally wanted these to be “asides” style in my main website, but alas, I couldn’t figure out how to do that—so microblog it was.

Going into the year, my thought was for this all to be a cascade of increasingly shorter URLs as the level of polish and required forethought declined. My longer posts and most important pages would end up on rscottjones.com, some other notes and shorter posts and not-quite-ready stuff would live at rscottjon.es, and rsjon.es would be used for links and microblogging, perhaps even replacing my mastodon account.

Did I mention that I also started paying for a Scribbles blog? Yeah, that’s what you’re reading right now. It seemed like a great way to participate in #WeblogPoMo2024, which I’ve enjoyed doing, even if I quickly got behind due to other life events. While I paid for a year and have enjoyed the experience so far, I don’t see this as being a serious solution for me—I just need a lot more features than what it will ever offer. It lives at scribbles.rscottjones.com right now (you can see the url, can’t you?), providing a dedicated rss for #WeblogPoMo2024, no matter where I post.

Ok, so that’s the website mess. Let’s get to the mess that’s my writing tools.

I have drafts…well, everywhere. It’s ridiculous at this point. I have drafts in Scribbles, in rscottjones.com, in a folder in Obsidian, and on iA Writer, and in Drafts, and also in Ulysses, but that my subscription for that isn’t active. Most of these aren’t full-on drafts, but snippets of thought, turns of phrase, the outline of an thesis I just conjured up in the shower.

The biggest problem here is that I’ve experimented widely with workflows—a solid place to capture quick ideas, and to draft without distraction, and to edit and finalize a post. But I’ve yet to find something that’s really worked well for me. And so each platform holds a batch of “tests” that I haven’t finished, or the “better capture this idea in […]” moments.

This chaos hasn’t mattered much, as I haven’t been writing very often anyway. So it all just feels like clutter. Some half thoughts, some useful paragraphs camouflaged by sentence fragments and quick lists. I really don’t know what I want it all to look like, and I hate designing websites, and so it’s all something that I can conveniently not quite get around to.

I guess what I’m saying is, it’s an absolute modern marvel that I’ve managed to publish anything at all this month!

The post My blogging process appeared first on rscottjones.

But in that simplicity, I’m finding it more difficult to abandon WordPress for my primary site than I’d like it to be.

That’s not because I actually enjoy using WordPress these days—it’s far too complicated than it used to be, at least for me. I don’t enjoy the experience there anymore, at all. But it offers some basic features that those simple platforms just…don’t (perhaps won’t?).

Permalinks

If you already have your own domain name and are moving an existing website from one platform to another, you probably already have a slew of published pages and posts. But many of these platforms don’t allow you to choose your own permalink structure, or update an .htaccess file.

So anyone who has gone to the trouble of linking to one of my posts is, well, about to regret having done so, as moving to another platform kills those links. For companies and customers that espouse a return to personal websites and blogging—where we intentionally directly link to others’ sites instead of relying on social media algorithms—this feels especially out of tune.

Related to that is maintaining the integrity of the links on one’s own site. There seem to be plenty of external services that you can employ to do this, but it seems like it should be a core feature that’s omnipresent in all blogging software. After all, if links are the lifeblood of the web, shouldn’t they be treated as important enough to keep current by every web publishing platform? At the very least, make this process as integrated and seamless as possible for me, so it’s easier to keep up-to-date.

Better menu support

While most of these platforms offer some variety of static pages—ones that live outside of the traditional chronological feed—there isn’t much support for websites that have more than a handful of pages, especially when it comes to menus.

There are a host of standard pages (here’s another good list of them) that are commonly found on personal websites. If you linked to each of these in your menu, it’d quickly overwhelm any other pages you’d like to highlight. Now, part of the idea of /slash pages is that they’re found in standard locations, but who wants to type in every variation hoping to get lucky? Sure, you can create one slashes page and manually link to everything within that one page. But that’s a hack workaround that buries the links.

On my website, I have nearly as many static pages as I do topical blog posts. Most of them are not standard slash pages that anyone would guess. I mean, not many other people have a quest to cross every state border combination in the country. Or visit all the sites that were once national parks but have since been abolished or transferred. Or to visit all of the World’s Largest Balls of Twine (yes, there’s four different ones that all claim the title)(And yes, I can go on and on about my various quests—don’t tempt me).

For me, these are all pages instead of posts because they’re more a permanent reference than a timely update. They shouldn’t be associated with a particular date, even if more detailed updates should be. For instance, Ideally I’d have one page for each of my ongoing travel quests, with occasional blog posts detailing when I’ve marked off another objective that are then referenced in the main page. At least, that’s what makes sense to me.

Unfortunately, simple menus just don’t allow for me to highlight all of the pages I have—pages that I always want to remain easily accessible no matter where on the site you are.

Photo galleries

One of the things I’d like to get back to on my website is posting more about our various travels, including posting a number of pictures from each trip. For the last decade or more, most of these ended up on social media platforms instead, which is a real shame. They should live on my personal website, after all.

But nearly all of the simple blogging platforms make posting a series of photos less-than-ideal. Sure, they render fine, but are mostly just a bunch of full-width images that require a lot of scrolling to get through. This doesn’t work very well for travel-related posts, as my visitors are pretty divided on whether they’re there primarily to see photos or there to read about the trip. 

While it requires a bit more coding complication, I like having things like a customized tiled gallery, or a carousel, or a slider of some sort for various photo-heavy blog posts. Hell, for a long time, it was a leading factor in which WordPress theme I chose.

Where does that leave me?

Oh hell if I know!  

The most likely scenario here is that I first attempt a redesign of my WordPress site (which sounds awful), while also micro-blogging on one of these other services—always using a custom domain that I can later redirect if I move those posts elsewhere. And if that solution doesn’t seem to work well, then perhaps the endeavor provides me with a bit more clarity on how to proceed.

Originally posted on scribbles.rscottjones.com

The post Why I’m sticking with WordPress, at least for now appeared first on rscottjones.

The idea was to start the blog, build a bit of a readership, immerse myself in the travel writing world, and improve my writing. One day, I reasoned, I might want to write a travelogue of my own, which would focus on my quest to visit various places that played key roles in the history of public land protection in America.

Of course, the best laid plans, right? While I snagged up a few domains, continued stockpiling writing ideas, subscribed to a ton of travel blogs and sought out travel and national park related social media opportunities on Twitter, I’ve yet to write a single freaking post.

Most of that is certainly due to a lack of time and energy – things have been very busy recently, and it doesn’t seem like the right time to try to squeeze something else into the mix. But that’s not all of the reason. I like planning things out, making sure I have done the required homework, and not necessarily one to jump in without giving something a thought. Since I haven’t had time to commit to spending any money getting the blog designed, nor have I had the time to fumble through doing it myself, I’ve procrastinated on doing the most important thing you need to do to have a successful blog – write something compelling, interesting, and useful. Instead, I’m concerned that I haven’t learned the art of Google AdSense, or am wondering which sidebar items are the most important to highlight.

There are some possible big changes afoot, and I’m wondering how much time and/or energy I’ll have to actually get this thing going. In short, I’m wondering if I should, indeed, commit to this project. Am I willing to forgo relaxing after a long day at work to write yet another post? Am I willing to skimp on dinner so I can afford to invest in the blog? Right now, the obvious answer is no. We’ll have to wait and see if it stays that way.

The post Fumbling along on the roadtripping blog appeared first on rscottjones.