My main frustration with the phlogosphere is that it’s not trivial to comment or discuss a phlog entry by other means that the web (which we all despise, right?)
There are solutions of course, but I find them inconvenient:
- emails
- instant messaging (IRC/matrix/…)
- /7/ item trick
- ???
What’s your take on that ?
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I’ve used the “Re:” method but it’s not discoverable by external readers or even the original author, so you gotta send an email to notify them. I do agree that it greatly increase the quality of replies though, which is nice.
I’ve never used Usenet, it’s a cool idea indeed, I’ll look into it.
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Yeah I use that too for my guest book, it uses the /7/ item type (search) to post whatever was searched as a comment. But it’s not convenient to comment on a single post.
I wrote a gopher blog engine called slerm that allowed comments. It’s still available at gopher://sdf.org/1/users/slugmax/gopher_blogging_utilities. It uses the /7/ item type, and requires the name of the post be prefixed in the comment field, which can just be copied from whatever post the user is viewing, so it’s not that inconvenient.
Edit to add - I’m ok with the RE: or email methods of replying to phlogs, despite those methods being less discoverable or slower - they seem to fit better with the gopher aesthetic.
For example the talking-about-my-generation thread, where phloggers edited in bibliographies of known/noticed other response phlog articles across both the gopher and geminispace.
When I used gopher back in the day, it was meant for consuming information, like at the university or the library. There was no contributing to gopherspace unless you were part of the institution that had the server and usually that information was for official business of that entity. Any discussion, if any, was through email, usenet, or on a BBS.
Having said that, when I started participating in the gopher of now and had my own place to phlog, I came across the same question. Then I realized that I was trying to treat gopher like the web of now, which has a place for comments and discussion, if you wanted to add that to your web page. Web 1.0 was mostly static web pages with no comments or discussions. Feedback was usually via email. I think that since the use of gopher ended basically where Web 1.0 started, it just stayed there with static pages to be consumed, not really meant to be commented or discussed. This works for me since this is the web I enjoy, not so much the web of now. Even my web page is done the old way in a text editor with static html pages.
There have been workarounds in the gopher of now, but they are usually one-off solutions. If I need to phost a comment about something I saw in gopherspace or the phlogosphere, I will phost in my phlog and reference the original phost as a footnote. That seems to me to be the common practice and works for me for the time being. Hope this helps.
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