Importing comments into static sites... what to do?

Webcraft
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I am finally getting my content sorted on interi, where I am moving the 1,200 or so posts, and either putting them on maiki.blog or in a memo section on interi. The level of technical detail determines what becomes a memo, and a very early one is up at https://interi.org/memo/internet-telephony/.

Aside: haha, ten years ago I was having the same issues, different providers.

Okay, there are a few copies of that document floating around, one such being at https://maiki.blog/2007/11/internet-telephony/, where you can see it has a few comments, from a discussion started by @tim.

I find Tim’s first sentiment to be relevant to the information value of the document. How do I incorporate that into the static page now? I have a feeling I am going to be asking this question a lot as I process the archive.

Do I copy and paste comments into content of the document?

Talkgroup will be around, do I faux-copy the comments in place, and recreate those threads… no, that is silly.

One thing I’ve considered in a different context is in lieu of comments: having responders just submit a patch to insert their comment (either as an isolated piece of content, or by changing the narrative facts). Then they could add their name to the authors list for that page.

That is kinda neat, applied to this, because it means I would be thinking about their comments critically, incorporating it into my original docs, and then reach out to them individually for inclusion as an author on the site… that is really neat!

Okay, I will probably do that, but glad to have worked it out in typing this. I will post it after all. :slight_smile:

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Ah! To make it interesting, I am gonna try to co-opt @tim into this scheme, and walk through the logistics, so I can put together a proper contrib guide for interi: https://allthe.codes/maiki/interi/issues/166 :slight_smile:

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I believe in this, probably what I’ll do when/if I eventually move to a static site.

Migrating existing comments into static pages with appropriate markup seems reasonable.

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Just FYI I’ve been thinking about this some. It seems like I should add it to the bottom of your post. Like I make a Contributor h4 or something and put my comments under that, in a quote, that points back to me. If there was already a Contributor section I would just add to that.

I could sort of mesh it into the post directly, but that doesn’t seem correct.

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Ah, there we go, that is definitely something the author of a site or piece can provide direction about.

If I were thinking of doing this to someone else’s post, then yeah I get how that could be weird. But I also see how it is easy for me to do myself…

I am hoping in the future to use talkgroup more often to discuss ideas, and then noting them on interi. If you look at the components involved (document, feedback, edit, feedback, share, edit, etc.), the relationship my content in interi and discussion here is very fluid, and less, um, causal. :slight_smile:

My new direction with interi is putting everything either as a memo or a note, the primary difference being if a subject is temporal in nature (think of a vulnerability announcement, or a changelog, as opposed to a guide or tip sheet).

I plan to design subtle elements into the site to indicate it is essentially a wiki. And hopefully we will develop a cool flow, where contributors feel more empowered to improve the public commons.

After explaining that, I realize I don’t actually want comments to live in a document. I want them absorbed into it, but for the conversation itself be archived and kept somewhere else. That is, of course, moving forward. All the comments on my site are on the Internet Archive, and honestly most of them will remain intact, as they were on the personal side, and hence will migrate to maiki.blog.

Rather than having conversations on a page, I would like to see them added via URL in front matter, and then programatically appended to the documents. This has the benefit of letting folks submit tiny patches if they wrote a response or complementary pieces, and I can probably automate webmentions as well…

About to disembark, so I will think on this as I board the next rail-based thing. :slight_smile: