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 ?
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.