What I hate about other blogging software...

[jbsegal]

... or at least the installations of such that I've come across...

With LJ, comments are a (more-or-less) useful way to have a conversation... they're threaded, you can (when things are working) get notifications of new replies to comments you've left, and so on.

With the other blogs that I've come across - MT, whatever powers blogspot (Blogger and Haloscan, it seems), and others - leaving a comment and reading comments are almost exactly the same as each other - a small (too small) window pops up with all the comments that've already been left, all left justified, one after the other, no indication of who's replying to who. When you want to leave a comment, most require an email address. Do they DO anything with this information? No. Do they send you mail saying "someone's left a new comment [they can't say "in reply to something you said", as there's no threading] on a post you showed enough interest in to contribute a comment to"? No.

In short, is there any way to see if someone's replied to (or near) you? No.

Pain in the ass crapular design.

LJ has its issues, yes. For the reasons above, though, it continues to be MUCH more usable for me.

It's also free and open-source... I gather some of the others are moving away from that?

Comments

[veek.livejournal.com]

In short, is there any way to see if someone's replied to (or near) you? No.

In MovableType, that's a yes. That is, if you install the appropriate plug-ins for threading and comment notification, written by members of the community when MT was still totally free (although not totally open-source). I've no idea whether that still works with versions 3.0 and above, which are paid and for which I've no intention of paying.

In general, I agree with you; but the blogging software in question hasn't been around for long, and that tends to mean slow development.

MT is no longer free, but WordPress is both free and totally open source. I haven't found out yet whether there are similar plug-ins for it that allow you to thread conversations and notify commentators.

[veek.livejournal.com]

Looks like WordPress is on it.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

IMHO, hasn't been around for long doesn't fly.

LJ's been on the air for something like 4 years. That covers far more than enough time for UI designers to get a clue... Anyone who isn't LJ has either been around longer and has no excuse on their own, or has LJs examples to work off of.

You are, of course, one of the people who I'm talking about with this rant... not that you don't have interesting things to say, but your comment mechanisim is so annoying that I'm not likely to reply to you. How about if you just kept a tab/window up with the LJ feed for your stuff in it, so you can see/join in the comments that people could then leave there?

(I'm eagerly awaiting the long-promised 'Event/Subscription/Notification' model that the LJ folks talked about a while ago, where everything is an event, you can subscribe to the ones you're interested in and receive notifications of your choice when something happens - say, get mail with new friends posts, or new comments on posts you find particularly interesting, or so on...)

[veek.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I'm assuming that it's more complicated to program comment threading and notification if your users install the software on their own servers. That feature was what first attracted me to MT; so, to each her own.

your comment mechanisim is so annoying

Oh, please. It's still one click away; but instead of clicking on LJ's comment link, you click on the URL that's embedded in the LJ feed post, and scroll on down. If anything, it's more convenient than LJ: clicking on aforementioned link leads you to all the previous comments and allows you to write your own comment on the same page. You can ask MT to remember your info so that you don't have to re-enter it; or if not, just clicky-type the two letters of your name in the appropriate field.

Threading and notification, now, I agree with you on. But actual commenting... seems like you're on a high horse.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

No, you see, threading and notification are all a part of the comment mechanism. I can say something but then never know if you've said anything back. That said, I think you changed something from the last time I looked - which admittedly was a fair while ago - as I don't think commenting that was that easy previously. If I'm wrong and you've always had it so configured, then you accidentally got lumped in with all the not-so-configured bloggers out there in my head. Oops.

To continue on to your next comment, it's very nice that you send mail manually to people. However, that's so far above and beyond what I would expect and even desire - replying to something I've said shouldn't be a 2 step process, and if there's something that would be a thread were there threading, a 3 or more step process, depending on who's interested, that I would never want to ask that of you, let alone expect you to have the time and/or energy to continue doing it.

[veek.livejournal.com]

I should also note that, knowing the shortcomings of weblog software, many bloggers will actually drop their commenters an e-mail, when replying to comments online. That's very nice of them, and sometimes I do it myself, when I have the time and when it's appropriate. But generally not to people who're snippy to me about not using LiveJournal. This sort of thing is precisely why I left it.

[luckylefty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a real Event/Subscription/Notification model would be way cool. I would really like to be able to say "I'm interested in the conversation in the comments hanging off of this LJ entry; send me email whenever someone comments on it".

I currently handle this situation by rescanning my friends' postings, and storing the number of comments in wetware, and reloading the comments page when it increases. This is *so* inefficient and error-prone.

This is the only feature I can think of that would make me become a paid member if they implemented it as paid-member-only.

[merde.livejournal.com]

a friend of mine, boutell, has a piece of windows shareware handy for tracking changes to websites. you can either schedule it, or just use it when you feel like it, and it'll give you a list of the websites you've told it to track and whether they have any changes to them since you last ran it.

i use it to keep up with lj and message board convos all the time. v. useful.

of course, if you're not a windows person, you're doomed.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm a paid member because I use their service and they deserve something for it.

Of course, that I could renew this year for a discount due to my old renewal-code rebate and the 2 free weeks due to other technical issues certainly made it easier.

I should contact John and see if he needs any more help. :)

[foldedfish.livejournal.com]

That's true of the out-of-the-box setup for MT, but some of those things are configurable. I'm running vanilla MT on my blog, and have the comments all showing up on one page, not a popup. (Admittedly, no threading.) And *I* get notified when someone posts a comment.

LJ's is still better this way, if you're looking to use a blog as a conversational center.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

LJ's is still better this way, if you're looking to use a blog as a conversational center.

I think the more interesting question is: Are _YOU_ /not/? I mean, if you (or the other non-LJ bloggers) don't want comments and then conversations, that's fine, and I'd guess there's a way to just turn them off, but as a commenter, not knowing if anyone's replied to me without having to go back and keep looking (at a growing number of posts, of course) makes me not want to bother...

[foldedfish.livejournal.com]

I think the more interesting question is: Are _YOU_ /not/?

Not especially. A lot of folks I know use their blogs to ask questions: "Anyone know where I can find a ____?" There, community and conversation are the very point. I use my blog more as "Here's something I found/did/am amused by," where I'm not really looking for the post to be a conversational seed.

[bluepapercup]

Yep, it's part of why I like lj so much.

i agree

[trysha.livejournal.com]

the other thing that livejournal has that no others have is the friends list capability.

there isn't a good way to perform aggregation of friends posts like they do in a friends list.

there is no way that I would go hit 10 or 12 different blogs.

i get behind on web comics due to this reason, and would forever be behind on reading posts.

THere also is "someone else maintains it" aspect, i pay for it and I just use it. It works and I'm happy.

Seems like sysadmins go through phases.

There is there 'install everything on your own home machine and be the sysadmin for yourself' phase.

And later on there is the 'i'm tired of compiling shit and figuring out dependancies.' phase :)

Re: i agree

[veek.livejournal.com]

I suggest you look into RSS and other syndication-based aggregators.

Re: i agree

[foldedfish.livejournal.com]

there isn't a good way to perform aggregation of friends posts like they do in a friends list.

Actually, if the blogs are RSS-enabled (as LJ blogs are, as are MT blogs by default), an RSS reader like bloglines.com will do this just fine.

[trysha.livejournal.com]

True, RSS solutions exist, I've looked at bloglines, etc....

They tend to be kind of clunky, no uniformity of interface between the different blog types.

They do not have the LJ friends list's nature, the easy addition of friends, the uniform and trivial way to add friends, and move around. they especially don't have the differening levels of security between friends accounts (friends groups, restricted posts) in a uniform manner if at all.

LJ is community based, and discussion focused - other blogs can be, but they are tacked on features that usually end up showing. LJ is downright viral in it's community based nature - that's its advantage.


I'm sure that they'll get there, but they aren't there now.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Actually, the software that I use for Blah Blah Blog has both threaded comments and email notification to commenters, although I seem to have somehow broken the former recently.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Why does it not surprise me that you're the one person to claim success in this field and NOT actually tell the assembled masses what package you're using in this reply? :)

Oh, right, because I've known you for 8+ years. ;)

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Oh, heh, sorry -- there's a little "powered by" link at the bottom of my blog. It's YABBOB.

[veek.livejournal.com]

I looked at it earlier today, and it's unclear: how's YABBOB connected to b2 and/or wordpress? Are they the same bunch of people? Friends of friends who keep pitching each other's warez? Actually much the same code with different names?

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

WordPress and YABBOB are both lineal descendents of the original B2 software. WordPress is the "official" successor in the sense that it's been socially blessed by Michel V, the former B2 author, but there was like an 8-month period in which Michel had basically vanished off the face of the earth, and a number of smaller projects sprang up to try to clean up B2's code a bit and add some features -- YABBOB was one of those, managed by my friend (and former college roommate) surfal_666.

oh, and...

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

...for the record, my considered opinion on the meta-topic being addressed here is that lj/blogging is a perfect demonstration of how Nietzsche's thesis of Eternal Return applies to the software industry, and that given another three to four years of diligent effort, the Blogger/MT/WordPress/LiveJournal communities will have progressed to a set of technologies that offer almost equivilant interface functionality to a circa-1989 NNTP newsreader, but with a spam problem equilant to Usenet circa 2004.

But oh well, at least it will be themeable.

Re: oh, and...

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, news was nice and I miss its functionality, but your analogy breaks down in a number of places:

A) alt.blogger.dr_memory, alt.blogger.jbsegal, alt.blogger.words_end etc etc, rather than alt.blogger.some_random_group_of_people - IE: There's a granularity that's far more obvious under the blog model. Yes, it's doable under usenet, but not as neatly.

B) As it stands now, I've received exactly zero pieces of blog-spam. I expect this can't hold, but I know that if I posted to usenet now, I'd have 10 pieces of spam tomorrow and a hundred in 5 days.

C) Of course, what I'm looking for is a giant distributed version of void where everyone gets to pick their own subscriber list. While I get too much mail, that's still the most functional paradigm out there, assuming everyone does the Right Thing in regards to threading.

Re: oh, and...

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

A) alt.blogger.dr_memory, alt.blogger.jbsegal, alt.blogger.words_end etc etc, rather than alt.blogger.some_random_group_of_people - IE: There's a granularity that's far more obvious under the blog model. Yes, it's doable under usenet, but not as neatly.

Hm, that strikes me as more of a problem with how Usenet was socially administered than with NNTP-qua-NNTP. In theory, you could have a blog.* hierarchy wherein every group was moderated, with the moderator being the blogger, and the blogger running some minimally intelligent software that turfed posts that were neither from him nor verifiably a reply to one of his posts.

In practice, of course you're right, nobody would do this: the suck.com visual model (central text crawl down a lightly-graphicked page) trumps all, for reasons that I suspect have a lot to do with how our visual cortexes are wired than anything else. I guess you could design a web-based front-end for an nntp-based transport that would Do more or less the Right Thing, but it would probably be easier to implement something approximating References headers in blog comments.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make wasn't internet old-fartism: I'm not nostalgic for Usenet at all. I just wish that the blogosphere had studied its failure a bit rather than cheerily reimplementing so many of them.

B) As it stands now, I've received exactly zero pieces of blog-spam. I expect this can't hold, but I know that if I posted to usenet now, I'd have 10 pieces of spam tomorrow and a hundred in 5 days.

Not only is it not holding, the dam has done burst. Outside of Livejournal and other registration-required areas, blogspam is already endemic, and is ramping up to SMTP/NNTP levels of ubiquity. My little no-account blog was getting 2-5 spams per day before I implemented a visual key system, but I don't expect that trick to work forever.

[merde.livejournal.com]

amen, brother. i prefer LJ for exactly those reasons.

I haven't done serious research but ....

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I get the impression that other tools are actually pretty good for the blogging side of things, and some have advantages over LJ, but that LJ is especially good for the community building aspect of the blogosphere, for the reasons you've given. That is, there's a "here is my [daily|weekly|irregular] newspaper column without a newspaper" approach, a "this is my diary and I'm being an exhibitionist" approach, and this funny community-building -- not quite Usenet, not quite diary, heavy blog aspects, a little bit of a web-board, community-focussed -- approach that makes LJ a bit different: useful to anyone who wants basic blogging tools, but especialy attractive to those of us with a community conversations bent.

I've got a friend with a blog on violinist.com, and she emailed me after peeking at my journal, asking, "I see that most of your entries have several comments. What is this highly interactive community of readers?" Basically, between the structure of the comment interface and the poorly-named-but-very-useful "friends" feature-cluster, I think LJ encourages that quite a bit.

[shayde.livejournal.com]

As one of those weirdos who has gone outside LJ and run my own blog, I feel your pain. LJ's comments system is quite involved, and has a reply-to / threaded mechanism I rather like. Many other off the shelf systems do not have this capability (including mine, which I'd like to remedy. I'm running Moveable Type 2.6).

However, as others have mentioned, there's a lot of plugin / updating going on in the community, so many tools are in place to up the functionality of the system. On top of that, I am enthralled with the back end tools for managing the blog and the comments system, as well as the feeds, layout, and content. I can't get that from LJ.

One of my biggest beefs in the Blogging community is the lack of attentioin to the RSS-ification of comments into a standard format. There is no way, without setting up RSS feeds on every blog comments section, to really track commentary. It's annoying, and to me it's a detriment to the entire system.

I feel that if the comments systems in blogs were structured, and linked via RSS or Atom, then that would in fact be the final nail in Usenet, and aggregators (such as Sage) will take on the role that newsreaders had 10 years ago. A way of presenting opinions from multiple sources in a clear, concise, and easy to follow way.

[erika]

Not to even mention the security aspects of livejournal that are non-pareil.