Rethinking Blog Comments
There was a time when the tools to publish online weren’t as plentiful as they are today. When everyone didn’t have a Weblog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. It was this strange, dark time when commenting first appeared.
Projects like Disqus and CoComment are trying to improve commenting - but I feel they’re still assuming we don’t already have a publication. We do. Lots of them.
Last night, Tom Elko and I dug into this topic for 2 hours and came out with some very interesting insight around re-thinking blog comments and Cullect’s current capabilities. All started from a very brief email he sent last week:
“I’ve been thinking, Culld and Cullect’s feature to publish a link with a comment to apps is probably the smartest commenting system out there for content based websites. A long thread after a post is fine, if you can get it…a discussion about the item on a reader’s social-network is waaaay better.” - Tom Elko
HOW TO: Build Your Own URL Shortener in 2 Steps
First, pick up a domain you’d like to use for your short urls - i.e. mine.url - and turn on a webserver.
To Receive a Shortened URL for your domain from Cullect:
Add the Cullect Item Stats javascript widget to an HTML page, passing it a long URL and your domain:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://cullect.com/item.js?only_link=1&link=[the-really-long-url]&domain=mine.url“></script>
To Redirect a Shortened URL from your domain
Add the Cullect redirect to your .htaccess file:
RewriteRule ^(l?[0-9]*)$ http://cullect.com/redirect/$1?domain=mine.url [L]
You now have your own custom domain URL shortener with all the bells and whistles Culld.us has. For extra credit - play around with the options in the Cullect Item Stats widget
Get Down: 21CST 11 Nov 2008.
I’m taking Cullect down for a bit to deploy an update - and improve performance.
Here we goooooooo.
Update 23:00 CST
Things aren’t working as smoothly as I expected. So you may experience some instability as I investigate. Thank you for your patience.
Update 00:30 CST
Still plugging away, still not seeing the progress I’d like to, and now the database is backing up. So, I think I’ll take it as a sign and back myself up. Until tomorrow.
Down for Maintenance - 23:00 CST Nov 10, 2008
I’m going to be running maintenance on Cullect’s database tonight - in preparation for a new deploy tomorrow.
As always, watch this space for updates.
Feedly Asks ‘Recommend’ or ‘Share’ ?
Edwin over at Feedly asks for comments about relabeling Feedly’s ‘recommend’ feature as ’share’.
In Cullect, I’ve settled on ‘Recommend’ because - unlike other feed aggregators/readers/thingys - all reading lists in Cullect are public by default. So, here, everything is automatically, ’shared’ (even ‘hidden’ items) and ‘recommend’ makes the most sense.