Labnotes » Rounded Corners - 126 (Comments and style)

We has comments. Kent Newsome has some interesting thoughts in favor of comments:

Anyone who knows the first thing about blogging knows that to be successful a blog needs to create and nurture a sense of community. Comments are by far the best way to do that. … This is why even newspapers have comments.

We has also comments. As does Mathew Ingram:

The first is (obviously) that not everyone has a blog, or wants to have a blog. I have some persistent commenters whose opinions I value who donâ€™t appear to have blogs at all â€” they blog by commenting. … The second problem is that not everything requires a blog post.

Here comment, tnxbye. And I agree with Reginald Braithwaite, comment on the post not all over the Web:

Those comments are on the Internet, but they arenâ€™t on the web. The web is composed of pages with contextually relevant links between them. Social bookmarking applications subvert this basic structure. They are unravelling the web itself.

And it all starts with the writing. The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard has some good tips for keeping your blog, well … easy to read (via Engtech):

Initially it is more difficult to create a good layout with a big font size, but that difficulty will help you design a simpler clearer site. Cramming a site full of information is not difficult, making it simple and easy-to-use, is.

Itâ€™s more difficult to create good compact design than it is to create good spread out design. Ask anyone thatâ€™s had to stuff 100 products into an 8 page DL catalog.

I recommend reading both — not surprising they’re both easy to read posts — and using these ideas in your theme. There’s nothing inherently complex or CSS tricky about it. (You might notice a slight change to the Labnotes style that happened over the weekend. Now you know why)

Money quote. Andrew Wulf waiting for evolution to do away with the Dinosaurs:

Ask anyone building corporate IT applications how long everything takes, how much configuration you have to do, how difficult it is to meet constantly changing requirements. It’s like modern Java, .Net, C++ are the QWERTY keyboard; designed to slow us down so that we don’t tax the hardware.

Jul 17th, 2007

Dr Nic

It might be interesting to put del.icio.us bookmark comments into each blog article page, sort of like displaying trackbacks. Del.icio.us has a widget to show “tagged by 56 people using tags: X, Y, Z”, but I don’t think I’ve seen an inline listing of comments made about a page outside of the page’s own comment system on any blog.

Could be fun.

PS. Thanks for having OpenID support for comments.

Hmm, reusing some of this code could do the trick - http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/9297

Sorry for thinking out loud :)

Assaf

I think it will be a cool project to pull comments from these sites into the blog. If you pull it into the database (much like backtracking would do), then you can display it as part of the content and it will show up in search engines.

Still won’t solve the broken conversation — commentators on Reddit will not see comments on DZone — but still a cool idea.

Jul 26th, 2007

InformationArchitects.jp « processi

[...] first knew about Oliver’s company InformationArchitects.jp via this Labnotes’ blog post highlighting The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard, and then Peter from the Ninjava group announced that [...]