Comments? Comments! Comments?

2012-11-18

I am torn on the subject of comments. At first I had comments on posts, simply because that is what everybody did. But in the early days of my journal I did not see the point, since all comments I got where spam. When I switched to Jekyll and used Disqus for comments, the spam went away; the volume of ham (good comments) kept the same, almost none. At which point I removed the comments completely.

After reading Jeff Atwood's Blogging about Blogging post, I re-enabled the comments. The point he reiterates Rory's guideline on comments:

A blog without comments is not a blog. Period. If there's no two-way 
communication-- if readers of your blog can't politely point out that 
you're full of crap-- then whatever you're writing may be great, but it
isn't a blog. Without the social dialog of feedback, you're merely 
publishing-- and publishing is something newspapers have been doing for 
hundreds of years.

To a certain degree this makes sense and on some blogs, especially Jeff's, the comments really do add something to the mix. But I don't have the critical mass of reader for many comments; if I ever get any I am taken by surprise.

But then again this is not a blog, it is my public journal. We all know that a blog is a hideous creature that lives at the bottom of a lake and reiterates on the latest press release from Microsoft, Google or Apple.

The Oatmeal ran a comic about Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web, he comments on comments.

Art is not born in a vacuum,
but it's not born inside a tornado full of shrieking trolls, either.

This makes total seance and this if the reason why I disabled the comments in the first place. (replace trolls with spammers)

But then again this is not art either, it is my public journal. I have comments enables only on journal posts and to a certain degree this makes seance. It is not like I think I need comments on every page, like comments on the login and contact page. (I did not find an example for this and Google failed me, but I have seen it.)

I think having comments is good, even if it only for you to ask me about my Uncrustify config.

P.S. I hope to keep the meta journal writing (not meta bloging) to a minimum.