Blog improvements

Oliver Leaver-Smith <oliver@leaversmith.com> on 2022-11-05 16:37:46

While I am in the mood, I thought that I would document a few things that I want to get working on this new way of blogging that do just work on other platforms.

Comments

I don’t want to inject any JS to do comments, nor do I want it to be too arduous to leave a comment (this rules out Webmentions, no offence). I’m thinking that it should be handled through mailing lists as the blog posts are. So a mailing list such as ~ols/blog-comments uses replies with the blog post’s message ID as a comment. Magic happens in the background to generate a static HTML page of comments, probably separate to the blog content itself. All of this would be seamless to the user, they simply email their comment and it appears on page. This would naturally replace the invitation to email my public inbox.

RSS

RSS would need to be expertly crafted in order to have a feed alongside the blog and the mailing list. I have a buggy mailing list to RSS generator that would do the job, but it would be nicer to have something bespoke that is generated at the same time as the index for the blog. I should probably also add on a “subscribe to this blog as a mailing list” link at the bottom of each post too.

New style

I’m bored of this one, which was only lifted from another of my websites that was meant to be plain. I think a full overhaul of all my branding is in order so maybe this one doesn’t belong here as it isn’t blog-specific.