The number of spam comments caught by Akismet has been rising so, in a moment of morbid curiosity, I decided to change the settings to move them to spam rather than quietly delete them. I want to see what those pesky bots are up to - even if only for a little while.
@hjertnes I’ve had it since 2008 so adding microblogging into what was already there seemed a natural fit. I was looking at mixing up how I blogged and this gave me the kick I needed. And I prefer having everything in one place rather than multiple blogs.
@colinwalker I'm keeping it separate for now. But are there any other advantages for hosting it yourself?
@hjertnes I like having total ownership and control, the ability to do whatever I want to it. When I first started blogging in 2003 it was on a self-hosted, highly modified SharePoint installation on a PC at home and that ethos has always stuck.
@hjertnes I fell off the wagon for a few years (2013 - 2016) and became a “social blogger” writing at Google+ and then Medium but I was just looking for a change and thought a different platform would give me what I needed. Turned out I just needed a different approach.
@hjertnes It all depends what you’re after: simpler and managed or more complex but controlled. There are compromises to be made both ways.
@colinwalker I'm already managing three other wordpress sites.
Let me see if I get this:
@hjertnes That’s right. You need a couple of plugins installed to handle and present the comments properly and there may be some manual theme tweaking that needs to be done.
@hjertnes You can either just use the app (those replies are solely contained within m.b) or write a new post on the blog and send a reply webmention from WordPress (and that’s where it starts getting tricky) as m.b has some support for external replies.
@colinwalker Okay, and are there any way to do that automatically? In other words: every time I post something with (one or more) at-username?
@hjertnes I seem to recall someone wrote a bit of code to auto-link @-mentions but I don't think the person will see it in their Mentions tab. That's why I use the app for replying/mentioning people. I think Manton is working on improving this stuff.
@colinwalker @hjertnes WordPress filter to auto-linkify @-names for Micro.blog ;-)
Per Manton's post that I link in the into, any properly-linked @-name coming in from an external blog does get converted into a Mention in your Mentions tab (this is for plain-jane new posts; it sounded like you guys were talking about self-hosting replies there at the end, so not exactly sure what the "do that" is in @hjertnes last comment).
@colinwalker It's pretty far down in my posts/comments already, and I didn't make the link stand out with the title, either, so no wonder you couldn't find it ;-) I need to practice better “Micro.blog-SEO” in my posts :-P