I’ll sell your memories, for 15 pounds per year.

How come “short” is longer than “long”?

It has been said, by many people on many occasions, that the most important part of a blog is in fact the comments. That the conversation is far more important than the entry itself.

I believe conversation to be very important; in that aspect I have been taught to be a good democrat. So, it’s not that I am against conversation per se, but the current format of blog comments is useless and demeaning to the commenter.

In all honesty, I must admit, that the reason I quit comments at first was due to laziness. I had made a redesign, and when I got to the comments, I just decided not to — I didn’t receive any comments anyway, and then, when I considered it further, I got to all these points:

I find your comment important, but it is secondary to my very important post

The fact that comments have been hyped as even more important than the starting post is not supported in any way, by the way comments are displayed. They are displayed after the entry; this is in itself not demeaning, given that it makes total sense for the item being commented on, to be displayed, before the comment is. But on a general note — some are better at avoiding this than others — the comments are displayed as having less important than the entry; they often have less space than the main entry, we use a smaller font size to represent key data, and the beat goes on. All in all, they’re displayed less.

I want you to comment, but not too much

In extension to not being displayed with very much space, an often just as a list item, the boxes in which to write entries, are often small as well. James Bennett said it best (unintentionally, of course) in his post, “ORM Wars”:

[U]nfortunately [Adam Gomaa’s] comment form is a bit too small to contain it all, so I’ll ramble about it here where I’ve got essentially unlimited space

Notice that James himself has got comments on his blog, which makes this even more peculiar.

We appreciate and embrace these comments, but we don’t expect them to have a life on their own, and they need to fit nicely in the limited space we offer them. No, we don’t exactly put maxlength attributes on the boxes, but making sense of a small textarea, containing more text than a couple of additional lines to when the scroll-bar appears, is not very easy at all.

I love your comments, but I don’t really trust you

Even if you manage to fit your clever comment in the text-field offered to you, there’s another step that can affect your comment: moderation. Now, there are many kinds of moderation, often applied in multiples:

• Sanitation of content (removing HTML, changing it to its entities, etc.)
• Checking for profanity and other indicators of spam
• Letting the author decide whether or not the comment shows up.

I am not saying that these steps are bad; I am all too aware of the risks of spam destroying everything. I am just saying, that if we don’t trust those entering data enough to let them, why are we? Furthermore, we apply all sorts of rel="nofollow" magic, as not to be gamed — essentially because we don’t trust our commenters.

So, genius, what do you suggest instead?

Ah yes, solutions. Well, methinks the solution is self-explanatory — Bennett even showed us how — comment from your blog. Most people who comment on blogs have blogs of their own. And it might help all those “You’re right”-comments.

There are plenty of ways to keep track of comments that don’t go in a comment form —- (track|ping)back and the likes of techmeme and Technorati. So we don’t even need traditional blog comments to have a conversation. Just write and link; it’s that simple.

I generally prefer English over Danish, in its lingual construction. I find the use of genders in languages unnecessary, and there are other nice things about English.

But it’s not perfect. One of the aspects of it I don’t like (which also appears in Spanish) is the use of divine intervention on sneezing. “[God] bless you” and “Jesús” in Spanish. In Danish, we use the Latin “prosit”, also known in English, as a salute when drinking. This simply means “may it benefit”, a rather neutral, yet meaningful saying, stripped of religion. The way it should be.

E-F-F-E-C-T
I’m a smooth operator, operating correctly.

When one is met with the sentence “I love you”, the proper response (if applicable) is “I love you too”. I, of course, don’t reply this. I reply either “And I love you” or “I love you” with an emphasis on “you”.

So, why do I do that? Because I find the “too” confusing. A proper use of “I love you too” would instead be “I love the smell of grass in the morning… I love you too” (caricatured, of course). Adding “too” means you’re chaining together, so this would be proper use.

I have started a new site, called simply Jonathan. You should check it out.

This is simply Jonathan, a new blog. By no means a new type of blog, so don’t get your hopes up.

However, there’s something new. I have, for quite a while now, been writing a blog called holst.notes. Yet, I found that I needed to create another type of blog. holst.notes is, as the name sort of implies, supposed to be a collection of small notes, but I also wanted a place to write longer, thought-through essays, which didn’t seem to fit the format of holst.notes.

So I created simply Jonathan, supposed to be that center of essays by me.

Difference

simply Jonathan is not here to take over holst.notes, it’s rather here to compliment it. I have not defined rules for what goes where, but I think that quick ideas, etc. I get, go into holst.notes, while ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time, go here.

As is quite well-known, thoughts evolve. Thus, a note I think about for a second might linger in my brain for a while, eventually turning into full-fleshed essay material.

A lingual note

Being neither British nor American, my English is neither. Thus, I might end up mixing colour and color, and other differences the two variants have. I beg you to bear with me.

Format decisions

1. One of the primary things I find separates simply Jonathan from a regular blog is my explicit desire to only show one entry per page. This serves the idea of essays and allows me to show a full entry even at the front page.

2. Comments. It has been said on many occasions that for a blog to be a blog, it has to have comments, and that the comments are in fact the most important fact, as discussion is good. I don’t believe this to be true; discussion is good, but blog comments aren’t. I’ll elaborate on this later on.

3. Mike Lee, a Mac programmer, recently started a blog, and the first entry stated, that the date was not important, and that he would go back and change the content, if his opinion on the matter changed.

   I considered this approach, but came to the conclusion that it was bullshit. There is a saying that goes “every text is a product of the time in which is was written”. I believe this to be true, so I decided the date should be displayed, and that in fact both the published and last edited date should be shown. Whether you go by this “I’ll go back and edit it” route, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the initial time of writing (nor the time of editing) doesn’t matter.

4. I also decided to adopt John Gruber’s footnotes. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but should it be necessary, I found it most appropriate to adopt the best way I’ve seen this done online.

5. Table of contents. This was mostly implemented for kicks, but I considered, that if I really am going to write lengthy essays, a TOC might come in handy.

Topics

The topic of a writing is always important. However, given that I am one with quite a lot of interests, there might very well be quite a lot topics appearing here. I’ll probably talk most about the following, though:

• Technology. I have a deep interest in programming languages, particularly Python, and the Semantic Web.
• Politics. With a world view deeply rooted in the socialist left, I see quite a lot of problems with the world as is.
• Linguistics. I enjoy lingual differences and peculiar parts of English and Danish.
• Sports. Being a huge fan of football/soccer, I will probably write something about this.

Technical

This section can be skipped, if programming and the likes does not interest you.

This site is powered by my own Django-based CMS. I considered some of the available systems out there, but found that none of them were really geared towards the sort of writing I intend here. Plus, doing it yourself can be quite fun. The site is written using standards compliant HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. The entries are written using John Gruber and Aaron Swartz’ Markdown.

The hosting is powered by GMTA ApS.

This is simply Jonathan. Enjoy.

Do me a favour, and break my nose
Do me a favour, and tell me to go away
Do me a favour, and stop asking questions.