We need to reimagine the Blog
By kowalski Posted in Blogosphere — Comments (33) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
A simple point:
People who contribute to RedState generally write and think better than most other people out there in the blogosphere. It's obvious from reading even the briefest of debates here that all our members work very hard to make their case, and are extraordinarily passionate about doing so.
The blog software is letting them down. It's just not good enough at handling and displaying long and contentious threads, like this one. By the time people have gotten past the third or fourth comment, things are getting illegible. What is worse is that because of the formatting, it makes the later arguments seem to "taper off" cognitively, as though they are becoming more "fringelike" -- and that fundamentally alters their tone, as least as I read things. I'd prefer not to start learning how to read English one word at a time in a column, and I also find myself reluctant to engage in long debates here at RS because the output looks so horrible and is so uncomfortable to read.
This is really no fault of anyone -- especially not the developers of Drupal, who after all are doing the best they can with virtually no money.
But I'd like to see Microsoft produce some really good blog software to address this fundamental flaw. I'd pay for it, because I actually bother to (try to) read the comments in these threads and I respect the people who take the trouble to write them. The first major design feature should be a way to display long, threaded discussions in HTML without this crazy and frustrating squashing effect.
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Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
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has better "Discussion" software. My comments are below.
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Mike Gamecock DeVine @ The Charlotte Observer
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Redstate I shall read
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
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I had a friend email me and ask why I would like Microsoft to produce the software. There are a couple of simple reasons:
1) Millions of people around the world already blog, and that is going to turn into billions of people relatively soon. There's a market there for good software.
2) Microsoft could really make a dent in its bad reputation as being primarily a marketing company (as opposed to a technology company) by writing some really cool blogging client/server software.
3) I don't think MS's reputation as being a bad technology company is really well-founded. But people don't have to believe me: they could put together a team of programmers and really make some spectacular blog software to interface with IE.
4) I'd pay a reasonable amount of money to own "Microsoft Blogger 2008" if it would allow me to set up blog sites as quickly and easily as, say, FrontPage used to allow people to build websites quickly. Servers are cheap, hosting is cheap. What we need is some nice, supported blog software with a favorable licensing agreement so that tinkerers can get at the code and improve it, and share their work. Wouldn't you pay $59.99 for that? I would. I have several wonderful servers and plenty of bandwidth, but I don't have the time to learn the ins and outs of Drupal or Scoop.
So get to it, fellas. The market awaits, and you could really take the opportunity to redefine the blog and make it work better than anything else currently out there.
We know you've got the R&D money.
1. Microsoft doesn't do licenses like you're talking about in #4. And I doubt they ever will.
2. For personal blogging software, $60 seems about right. For community software, like Drupal, I don't think you'll see a price like that.
3. How would you like the nested comments to work? I don't think you'd have to change Drupal to address that -- just change the way the pages are presented.
4. Aside from nested comments, what don't you like about Drupal? It takes more than one dissatisfying feature to make starting from scratch the right approach.
"I should be allowed to think" -- John Linnel
We are presenting large nested threads without too much of a problem.
Example:
http://www.swordscrossed.org/node/1039#comment
"To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it." AR
I think you'd still have a problem if you had over 20 levels of nesting, like the thread kowalski linked to.
The parent link is great, though, and the timestamp of the comments is very cool too.
"I should be allowed to think" -- John Linnel
Ultimately you need more space allocated to the comments. On our blog I limited the nesting to about 13/14 levels and then it just goes down vertically without indentation. In those extreme cases parent links help.
"To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it." AR
Not being an expert (at least not in that IT technology) I looked at the referenced link and find that less inviting then the Red State format.
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How about providing a link in each comment to open a page with that comment at the top level?
That comment would then have the full width of the content column, and its children and grandchildren would still be wide enough to read coherently. If the exchange continues a few levels beyond that and you reach a comment that's too narrow, you again click the "View as top level" for that comment, etc.
Every software imposes some limitations, hopefully the current one allows it. If I recall correctly, the old set up provided something like that, maybe it was the "Parent" link.
In general, I think the old site set up was more user friendly, and from that perspective I'd favor going back to it. Of course there may be other aspects that only the administrators deal with, which justify the current software despite its interface disadvantages.
I will say, "I agree." An example of software that is easier to use and obviously available to somebody is currently being used by the old group of Knight-Ridder newspapers. I don't know if it's proprietary, but you can get to a sample by going to
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/
and clicking on "Discussion Boards" on the lower left. The words "Prospero.com" come to mind.
By golly, I even found it at the Charlotte Observer, Gamecock, although I had to work at it.
http://forums.charlotte.com/kr-cltrant/start
They eliminate the nesting problem by assigning each comment a unique and non-changing number, and the top corner of each message includes the information "83596.8 in reply to 83596.3" with the second number being a hot link back to the comment being replied to.
Furthermore, the search software enables easier searching than does ours at RedState (but not perfect searching, either). It is very easy to find all your own comments and all those addressed to you.
In some versions of the software, it is very easy to italicize, bold, and create block indents, something I keep forgetting how to do at Redstate.
Also included is the ability to have an email message automatically sent to you if somebody replies to any comment you've made, no matter how old and stale the comment might be.
All in all, it's exponentially easier to use than is our software.
There are other differences as well, of course. One key difference is that advertisements and links to other areas of the website don't appear on every page alongside the comments. From an income generating standpoint, this would seem to be a major problem.
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Why not just bring back the ability to see all the responses to your own comments. We have been asking for this since Redstate changed formats the last time. Come on!
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that is the more difficult parts to get to work in drupal.
"To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it." AR
We are actively working with a designer to solve this and the other comment problems. I very much appreciate this input. It's quite helpful.
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Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
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This wasn't a dig at RedState in particular -- other Drupal-based (and Scoop-based) blogs that I've read suffer from it if their contributors are as bright and feisty as the ones here.
There has to be a better way for the user to display these long threads. The blog software is evolving and I'm sure there will be a lot of contending ideas. I imagine something like an option to "collapse" or "digest" a thread to all the titles contained beneath it into a window containing a simple list of titles, and when you mouse over each title in the list, a window opens that displays the entire message, in non-squashed format.
That's major surgery, though. I would require a complete redesign of the way the software works with the client browser, which is why Microsoft would be well-positioned to consider it.
If done properly. For example, the user would have the option to display all the message titles in a thread ONLY, and then just mouse over the entries. Right now, the server has to go through the machinations to build the ENTIRE page each time and shoot it to the client.
What a waste of bandwidth!
A true solution would be a piece of client software that is tied to the server intelligently. So you would buy "Microsoft Blogger 2008" and along with that you'd get "Microsoft Blog Explorer 2008" to work with MS-Blogger sites.
Yeah, I'm evil. Sue me. ;)
And newsreader. Outlook has one built in.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
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Actually, it's much worse than Microsoft Outlook. Something is going to have to be done. The inconvenient truth is that the blogosphere is a big bandwidth-waster and the "interface" such as it is for any blog is always the end result of the template the server has to serve, *not* how the client would like to display the information.
When I think of the blogosphere, I know that each blog is really a big, database-backed interactive website that has been neutered in the sense of allowing contributors to screw themselves up. The blog has made it safe for people who didn't know how to write HTML to express their opinions on the web.
The problem is now that everything is being shot back and forth in plaintext based on a piece of software running on a server that "constructs" the page and shoots it out to the client verbatim.
This is nuts. If you click on this page from the "recent comments" list, the server has to completely rebuild it from scratch (with all of the corresponding database hits) and then write the HTML to fire it back to you, the end user. Finally the browser scrolls down to the comment you wanted. That's a barebones description, but it's pretty accurate.
The existing blog software is therefore both a tremendous waste of a precious resource and basically an glorified bulletin board system based on web forms. It ain't going to be here in five years.
If you want you can get a skinnable newsreader.
The brilliance of the blog is it just works for most people. You post its there no need for new software no need to learn anything new you just use it. Its the ultimate impulse application.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
But is also the fatal flaw of the blog software. You either get the full page or you get nothing. It's a big waste of bandwidth, and the formatting is strictly decided on the server, by the people who design the theme of the site. You have no choice but to accept how the blog looks and works in your browser.
But based on a vastly expanded collaboration between the client and server. Let's say you have 15 blogs that you like to read. Some of them have recent comments lists, some of them have little "RedHotesque" sidebars, some of them have "recommended" lists, all of them have comments enabled, and of course everyone has a theme they want to display.
The software connects to each blog and the first thing it does is download the "theme" of the blog which lets it know what features the blog has available, and displays it according to the way the designers wanted. But once it has that in hand, it doesn't need to request that HTML ever again, or until it changes.
Then the user can go and take those features that each blog supports and do with them what they want: collapse threads, expand threads, sort them, search for them, etc. And the only time the system has to download something is when the server lets it know "something is new."
Relief! And much greater flexibility.
Here's what he had to say about the comment thread being smushed up against the right margin problem:
Override theme_comment_thread_expanded (that's the function that adds the left-margin for a threaded comment). Have the new function only add the left margin if $comment->depth && $comment->depth <= $some_maximum_depth_you_define
From what I understand, once comments get to a certain depth they won't get indented any more, so they won't get below a certain minimum width that way. I'm not sure if that's any better or not, but there you go. He adds that it's possible with some code to reduce the indenting by overriding that same function to, for example, indent less and less as you get closer to the right margin.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777