Is this thing on?

27 Jul 2006 1 pm eastern

Just letting my RSS peeps know that zeldman.com now accepts comments. As of yesterday, actually. All right, then.

[tags]zeldman, wordpress, blog, comments[/tags]

Filed under: Community, Publishing

121 Responses to “Is this thing on?”

Hans said on 27 July 2006 at 1:29 pm:

Holy shmoly! A new era of Reports! I must say congratulations before the Onslaught begins…
huphtur said on 27 July 2006 at 1:33 pm:

confirmed (via rss)
Kero said on 27 July 2006 at 1:40 pm:

First! :)

Great move Mr. Z. Are they moderated? I guess I’ll find it out jst after the click.

*clicks*
Cameron Moll said on 27 July 2006 at 1:57 pm:

Yay!
Mau said on 27 July 2006 at 2:04 pm:

Yay! It will be grand!
Dale Cruse said on 27 July 2006 at 2:05 pm:

Comments? Shweet.
Neil Crosby said on 27 July 2006 at 2:15 pm:

Just joining the great “hooray” about the opening up of comments.

So, yes – “hooray”, I say!
Chris Harrison said on 27 July 2006 at 2:20 pm:

Awesome! I sub to your RSS feed and visit often. There have been a number of times where I wish I could have left a comment on posts… now I can. :) Looking forward to future discussions here on your site!
Jon Lee said on 27 July 2006 at 2:24 pm:

I was wondering if you were going to accept comments after switching to WordPress. I guess I just found out.
Elliot Swan said on 27 July 2006 at 2:45 pm:

Sweet, I’ve been wating for this to happen ever since you switched to WP.
markku said on 27 July 2006 at 2:52 pm:

Wow, this is definitely something I’ve been anticipating for several years now. Your move to WordPress suggested you were headed this way, and now you’re allowing comments! Woohoo!

I hope you have akismet running, probably the only comment spam solution you’ll ever need.
Greg said on 27 July 2006 at 3:12 pm:

Neat! How much, if any, HTML is allowed? The usual bold/italic/hyperlink, or nothing at all?

I guess I could just try it and find out.

Did that work?
Adam Kalsey said on 27 July 2006 at 3:38 pm:

When I commented yesterday I had no idea that I would be the first-ever comment on Zeldman’s blog. Do I get a prize or something?
Stafford Kendall said on 27 July 2006 at 3:48 pm:

Congrats and such
Tim said on 27 July 2006 at 4:31 pm:

Holy frijoles — I never thought I’d see the day.
jeremy said on 27 July 2006 at 4:44 pm:

Excellent. i think i’ll comment then!
Ara Pehlivanian said on 27 July 2006 at 4:51 pm:

I wanted to say something yesterday when I noticed them activated but I didn’t want to just leave a meaningless comment. Gotta say, it’s cool to be able to finally comment on Zeldman.com!
Sarven Capadisli said on 27 July 2006 at 5:01 pm:

Opening the comments here is a great move. Hearing the voices of many people from the Web development community will surely create a lot of discussions which will in turn contribute back to the community.

Cheers!
Nathan said on 27 July 2006 at 5:07 pm:

Great. Look forward to discussions.
Mike Cherim said on 27 July 2006 at 5:13 pm:

There goes the nice short page-length :-)
Jordan Ryan Moore said on 27 July 2006 at 5:33 pm:

It’s about time… ;)
XINERGY said on 27 July 2006 at 5:46 pm:

Ahhh… And the gates to communication have finally opened. May you gain valuable feedback from your readers.

XINERGY
Rob Mientjes said on 27 July 2006 at 6:20 pm:

Good thing the first (and hopefully only) “troll” is a certain Storey :) I’m not gonna cite Bob Dylan, but certainly you already have yourself.
David Anderson said on 27 July 2006 at 6:43 pm:

I can comment on your blog but I can’t find your book in the brick-and-motar bookstore. And since Amazon ripped me off for $150 I refuse to give them anymore money. Sorry, completely off topic.
Jeremy said on 27 July 2006 at 6:57 pm:

I am pretty quite lurker for the most part, but every now and then I have something to say. I will ditto others here by saying that I too have missed this feature in the past, and am glad to see it active now for future use. Oh, by the way, love your blog!
Tanny O'Haley said on 27 July 2006 at 7:08 pm:

Wow! Comments! As popular as you are, do you really have the time?
John Dunagan said on 27 July 2006 at 7:27 pm:

If only so that I can say to you: congrats, Jeff.

it was a good move.
Christian Watson said on 27 July 2006 at 7:27 pm:

Great news – here’s looking forward to some good discussions and not too many trolls.

PS: Any chance of a comment preview?
Tassoman said on 27 July 2006 at 7:49 pm:

You’ll be very busy now.
Martin said on 27 July 2006 at 7:50 pm:

Good news.

I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering about what eventually tipped your judgement in favour. Will you perhaps write about what I assume is essentially a change of heart?
Mike Whitehurst said on 27 July 2006 at 7:56 pm:

hmm, comments, well ok…
twelveoaks said on 27 July 2006 at 7:57 pm:

I have no useful comment at this time.
Keep up the good work!
Mau said on 27 July 2006 at 7:58 pm:

hehehe… Greg gets along very well with Z.
Greg said on 27 July 2006 at 8:05 pm:

Hmmm, I don’t recall ever outsourcing comment writing. To the person who thought that was really cute: put your Protec helmet back on, stop drooling, and try not to pee on the carpet when the doorbell rings.
Dave said on 27 July 2006 at 8:15 pm:

Hey Jeff,

Congrats on getting the comment system working. Just remember to watch out for comment spam!

Regards,
Dave.
Michael said on 27 July 2006 at 8:27 pm:

Of all the brave things you’ve done (professionally), this may be the bravest.

Did I say brave? I meant insane.

Here’s to everyone playing nice.
Kevin Sweeney said on 27 July 2006 at 9:28 pm:

Dude, you just got called an idiot on your own blog. ;)
Ben Buchanan said on 27 July 2006 at 10:20 pm:

I have a mental image of you hitting the button, then leaping under your desk screaming "incoming!!!" ;)
Dave said on 27 July 2006 at 11:43 pm:

The link on my name is wrong. It has a comma instead of a full stop. I didn’t type it like that. :-/
Nirav said on 27 July 2006 at 11:59 pm:

That’s great news. Honestly, I had not been visiting regularly – and now you are again on my daily list. Discussions make it very interesting. Thanks.
Ross Johnson said on 28 July 2006 at 12:22 am:

Wonder if putting a cap on the amount of comments for post will become necessary?
Kyle said on 28 July 2006 at 12:23 am:

I feel like the gates have been opened… the barriers let down. Let the debauchery begin.
draco said on 28 July 2006 at 12:29 am:

Ahh, comments after so long. Finally!

Like others I was also wondering if you were ever going to open up comments. Now I know. ;)
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 28 July 2006 at 12:39 am:

The moat has been drained, the drawbridge lowered.
Enrique said on 28 July 2006 at 2:08 am:

La verda es que se echaban de menos en este sitio ;-)
Luuk Platschorre said on 28 July 2006 at 4:41 am:

Comments are so Web 2.0! It might require a new Zeldman-logo, with shines and wet-flooreffects and all … ;-)

But seriously, opening comments is great, and insane at the same time. I’m hoping for some good discussions and feedback here.

And it finally gives me the chance to say: Thank you for all the good reading over the years!!
klaas said on 28 July 2006 at 5:57 am:

Wahey! About time…
JBagley said on 28 July 2006 at 7:25 am:

This just feels weird…

It’s like looking at a Ferrari on the showroom floor and the sign now says – “get in and press all the buttons!”

:-)
Emilio said on 28 July 2006 at 9:02 am:

Another “wow” comment here!
This is really a new era.

Hope all the inevitable comment spam won’t steal you too much time.
Thank you Jeffrey!
Jeff L said on 28 July 2006 at 10:26 am:

Geez, I want to get in on this just so I can look back in 10 years and say “I was there when….”
Jeremy Flint said on 28 July 2006 at 10:28 am:

Didn’t you do a semi-comments thing for a while with your Apartness blog on Blogger? I seem to remember a few times you posted here, but then directed readers to Apartness to comment.

Maybe that was before the switch to wordpress.
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 28 July 2006 at 10:36 am:

Didn’t you do a semi-comments thing for a while with your Apartness blog on Blogger?

Yes.

Maybe that was before the switch to wordpress.

It was! I was still hand-coding this site at that time.
Greg C said on 28 July 2006 at 11:01 am:

Australia says hello, well at least one of us….
Gregg T said on 28 July 2006 at 12:19 pm:

Excellent News…
Nick Finck said on 28 July 2006 at 12:47 pm:

Thanks Jeffrey! I hope that the users commenting keep it civil and professional. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to deal with moderating comments here on zeldman.com, i know it’s practically a full time job for me at Digital Web Magazine and that’s with disabling comments on older posts, etc.
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 28 July 2006 at 10:16 pm:

Adam Kalsey said:

When I commented yesterday I had no idea that I would be the first-ever comment on Zeldman’s blog. Do I get a prize or something?

Yes!
ginyuuのRSSリーダー - 受信箱 said on 29 July 2006 at 12:04 am:

[...] Is this thing on? Zeldman.com now accepts comments. [...]
David Armano said on 29 July 2006 at 9:11 am:

Found my way over from Experience Curve. I’m not familiar with this blog, but since it relates to Web Design, I will check it out in more depth.

Congrats on the move to allow comments. It will add a new dimension ti this blog as people begin to exchange ideas, share opinions, and build upon each others thoughts.

Nice move.
Don Ulrich said on 29 July 2006 at 2:51 pm:

Yikes! comments? Otay, I guess, but why must everything be commented on?
I don’t know if it really furthers the process. I liked the homepage feel sans comments. Like minded opinions do not make truth, only mediocre consensus.
Still, this must cut down on the email. Blog on garth….
Frank Taillandier said on 29 July 2006 at 3:33 pm:

Bravo jeffrey, now you’re part of Web 3.0
JF said on 29 July 2006 at 8:12 pm:

All I can say is “Yay!”.
Tyson said on 30 July 2006 at 12:13 am:

Hey Jeffery!…excellent…it’s nice to be able to drop comments here after reading your site since about 1999

I remember back in the day i used to just send you emails…i think this will be an improvement….not that emails are hard to write or anything, but this is a nice way to get a sense of what folks think of a particular article…also, it creates a nice sense of community…

all the best!
cheers
Tyson
Piero Fissore said on 30 July 2006 at 5:30 am:

Oh, comments on zeldman.com. Nice. So, after four years I can say: “Hello, Zeldman”, and you can hear that. Yes: nice.
Pingu said on 30 July 2006 at 6:50 am:

Good for you!
Arthur Chidlovski said on 30 July 2006 at 6:19 pm:

comments @ zeldman.com? i am speechless…
it might become a full-time job just to read all of them though…
best wishes to the best!
your visitor and reader since 1996…
Pnhckriaoae (Pianohacker) said on 30 July 2006 at 10:38 pm:

Comments!
High levels of yay-ness…
Mondo Dynamo said on 31 July 2006 at 6:44 am:

Congratulations on throwing your posts open to comment – good move!
Beast-Blog.com | Mike Cherim’s Professional and Personal Web Log | Blog Archive » A Really Bad Neighborhood - - said on 31 July 2006 at 8:11 am:

[...] I don’t how somebody like Zeldman is going to deal, now that he accepts comments if I get bombarded so much. I suppose we’ll be seeing something like that on his footer soon enough. [...]
Derek Pennycuff said on 31 July 2006 at 12:52 pm:

Hellow comments.

Goodbye productivity.

;)
lunchmoney.org said on 31 July 2006 at 1:20 pm:

[...] Is this thing on? [...]
Jeff Wilkinson said on 31 July 2006 at 1:25 pm:

testing, 1,2,3… ouch! better turn those comments down, the feedback is LOUD!
;-)
rapt00r said on 31 July 2006 at 3:14 pm:

Good to see you added comments!
alan said on 31 July 2006 at 3:29 pm:

But with comments on, how will you keep The Internet out?
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 31 July 2006 at 4:46 pm:

But with comments on, how will you keep The Internet out?

Heh. Good one.
Brandon said on 31 July 2006 at 8:36 pm:

Woohoo! Thanks Jeff.
Erin said on 31 July 2006 at 11:16 pm:

Dude! I look away for the weekend and *poof*, comments. Yay!
Halans said on 1 August 2006 at 1:46 am:

Comments, pff, so last century… ;-)
Dave Weeks said on 1 August 2006 at 12:24 pm:

Jeff, nice touch. You are building a very cozy community. Dave
Mosquito Adventures� Official Website said on 1 August 2006 at 1:23 pm:

[...] Is this thing on? Zeldman.com now accepts comments. [...]
Ryan Masuga said on 1 August 2006 at 5:49 pm:

With the addition of comments, there is even more reason to frequent this site. If a site has a good community (which this one does, I’m certain) you can learn almost as much from the comments as from the original post. One suggestion: figure out a way to separate trackbacks from actual comments.

Anyway, good move!
Marko Dugonjić said on 1 August 2006 at 8:47 pm:

It was about time, ha ha! Gratz on the delivery
Mau said on 2 August 2006 at 2:07 pm:

Hey Jeff!

The RSS2 generator shipped with WordPress needs a small mod to pass validation. Open your wp-rss2.php file (found in your root directory), and find ‘wfw:commentRSS’ , then change that to ‘wfw:commentRss’.

You need to find it twice.. the opening tag, and the closing tag.

And voilá. =)
Mau said on 2 August 2006 at 2:22 pm:

Actually passes validation (my bad…) but there are annoying warnings.

The ‘Encoded…’ warning is fixed by going to your wp-admin | options | reading, then setting the syndication feed to ‘Summary’ which makes the feed ‘text only’ (me thinks).

So, question… What is better? to make sure it validates without warnings? or make it look nice on RSS Feed Readers (like this one)?
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 2 August 2006 at 3:42 pm:

Thanks for your concern, Mau, and also for the tips. But I’ll keep things as they are.

Switching to “Summary” would send summaries instead of full text. I’d rather deliver full text.

My RSS feed preserves structural semantics (i.e. lets headlines be headlines) and sometimes includes images. The semantics and the images convey meaning. I’d rather deliver more meaning with validation warnings than less meaning with no warnings.
Jason Wall said on 2 August 2006 at 4:35 pm:

Spiffy!
Daddyo said on 2 August 2006 at 4:57 pm:

Keep up the great work! Bollocks to the detractors!
Thankypu!
Daddyo said on 2 August 2006 at 5:00 pm:

Re: last comment
should have read :- Thankyou!
Long day….. sorry!
Drew said on 2 August 2006 at 6:06 pm:

Dear Mr Zeldman. In addition to your acting duties for the position of “somewhere between intenet ‘guru’ and ‘god,’ ” your are now tasked with the duties of comment moderator. Good luck. Some of us are crazy.

For in the same way that Lassie can have fleas, your website will itch with the irritation of the 2% of your audience who are annoying, nasty, and malicious. Good luck.
Edward Einhorn said on 3 August 2006 at 1:38 pm:

Thanks for opening it to comments!
sarcosos@mail.ru said on 3 August 2006 at 3:38 pm:

What 2%?
Tim Kenington said on 3 August 2006 at 7:12 pm:

Great work Jeffrey! Can’t wait for An Event Apart Melbourne or Sydney here down under!!!
Nano Taboada said on 3 August 2006 at 8:06 pm:

Well thank you for adding another dimension to the space where we intereact with your premiere content. In other words, this is like “Ah, you mean the man in that book’s cover? yeah, he’s Zeldman, we chat often” w00t! hehe :-P
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 3 August 2006 at 10:10 pm:

Can’t wait for An Event Apart Melbourne or Sydney

Sounds good to me.
Dante said on 3 August 2006 at 10:11 pm:

Comments on Zeldman.com? About time!

I wonder how long it’ll be to you start having to deal with comment spam…
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 3 August 2006 at 11:04 pm:

Spam? Within a day of turning on comments. Much of it is link farm pingbacks and trackbacks, rather than traditional robotic non sequitor posts. But WordPress has great moderation tools, making it easy to detect, flag, and banish spam. I also installed Bad Behavior, and it seems to be quietly helping.
patrick said on 4 August 2006 at 2:04 am:

I REALLY hope you are still planning on making An Event Apart tour stop in Los Angeles. If not, I have lost faith in the human race…
henry said on 4 August 2006 at 3:48 am:

very good ! you are great man .
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 4 August 2006 at 9:16 am:

Thanks, Patrick! We don’t announce upcoming cities until we’ve got dates and venues locked in place. We don’t enjoy keeping people in suspense, but we’d hate to disappoint you if we announced a location and couldn’t follow through. That said, you can probably expect An Event Apart in or near Los Angeles before too long.
Tony said on 4 August 2006 at 10:29 am:

Not sure if anyone mentioned this before (98 comments so far), but the comments look like:

X person says the date and then some other stuff after that

with the current layout of comments.
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 4 August 2006 at 11:17 am:

Good eye, Tony. Just did some comment layout tinkering. Should be better now.
Chris Huff said on 4 August 2006 at 2:28 pm:

I may as well jump on the bandwagon. Adding comments was a good move. Interactivity. I love it.
Ray said on 4 August 2006 at 3:48 pm:

Monsieur Z,

Now that you’ve opened the doors for community participation is there any chance you’ll re-open the old book cover design contest? (knudge-knudge wink-wink)

Congrats on the big step… comments. I hope you get as much enjoyment out of it as we do. This is going to add a whole new dimension to the Daily Report.
Ash Haque said on 5 August 2006 at 6:05 am:

I smell a revolution :)
A.M. Digital said on 5 August 2006 at 6:05 pm:

Greetings from…. Belarus :)
Tony said on 6 August 2006 at 2:12 am:

Much better, and good job on making the site more interactive.
Destry said on 6 August 2006 at 3:51 am:

I guess I’m in minority that atually liked it the other way. I can certainly understand why Andrei Herasimchuk pulled up his drawbridge and filled his moat. Comments are great when comments are…well…great, but Drew…I think you got the wrong part of that percentage ratio.

I’m sure you’ve weighed your objectives against the noise factor carefully, Jeffrey, and know well what you’re doing. ;) (Comment numbers, perhaps, so folks can refer to, say, post 532 on page 6?)
Dante said on 6 August 2006 at 7:19 pm:

Not to be greedy, but may I request An Event Apart San Francisco?
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 6 August 2006 at 9:32 pm:

Comment numbers, perhaps, so folks can refer to, say, post 532 on page 6?)

Permalinks, baby.
Adactio Elsewhere: Small pieces of me, loosely joined said on 8 August 2006 at 6:25 am:

[...] Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Is this thing on? Jeffrey’s only gone and turned on comments. Who’s next? Joe? Me? I just hope he remembers the corollary of Sturgeon’s Law for blogs. [...]
/pd said on 8 August 2006 at 11:40 am:

will comments be rss enabled per post ?? I dont see a flag which sez : “RSS feed for comments on this post”

at times, its good to take a highly interest post and obtain comments via rss.

Just a thought
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 8 August 2006 at 4:53 pm:

will comments be rss enabled per post ?? I dont see a flag which sez : “RSS feed for comments on this post”

you don’t see a flag which sez that becuz rss feeds are not enabled per post. at least, not at this time.
Glenn said on 9 August 2006 at 10:41 am:

Giggidy!
Jowra said on 9 August 2006 at 4:51 pm:

… becuz rss feeds are not enabled per post. at least, not at this time.

Not enabled?

http://www.zeldman.com/2006/07/27/is-this-thing-on/feed/

Sure, only the last 10 Comments which is not much on a one-sentence-post with 112 comments so far. Gratz.

/pd, take the standard blog-feed and use a programm like SharpReader that supports the “wfw:commentRSS” Element. Thats even simpler.

Cheers,

John
Javan said on 9 August 2006 at 10:33 pm:

well i’d better hop on this comment train!
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 10 August 2006 at 9:45 am:

Not enabled?

Ah. Semantics. WordPress allows per-comment RSS feeds, so it is possible for readers to abstract them by adding /feed/ to the end of the URL. I could also automate this via PHP and design a widget to let readers subscribe to the comments for any individual post. I may get around to it. It was clearly a good thing to do for A List Apart articles, but I don’t see as great a need for readers to do it here. But, maybe.
Eddie Traversa said on 11 August 2006 at 1:49 am:

Glad to see comments turned on, I always appreciate your insights.

One thing though that you may want to consider.

Every time you have separate JavaScript links in your page you are slowing the loading of the page down and thus not creating an optimal experience for your readers in terms of page loading times. Why is this important?

Because people look to you to lead the way. Your JavaScript should all be rolled into one script and one external link. That will slightly increase the load times, you can test it for yourself and if you need help with a page load time script to test with let me know.
Jeffrey Zeldman said on 11 August 2006 at 8:39 am:

Hi, Eddie. The slight lag you’re describing has nothing to do with the scripts in the head of the template, or the fact that they are separate. Those scripts have been sitting there like that for several years with no problems.

The occasional slight lag is new and has to do with the job board I inserted in the sidebar starting yesterday. JavaScript calls the job board up as well, but the lag comes from the fact that the job board is housed on a separate (and busy) server (not from JavaScript).
WaltDe said on 1 September 2006 at 9:43 pm:

Very good reading. Peace until next time.
WaltDe
Netdiver NEWS archive -> August 2006 said on 20 October 2006 at 1:31 am:

[...] Dear Mr Zeldman. “In addition to your acting duties for the position of somewhere between intenet ‘guru’ and ‘god,’ your are now tasked with the duties of comment moderator. Good luck. Some of us are crazy. [...]
emergency weblog » 2006 » July said on 9 March 2007 at 11:16 am:

[...] Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Is this thing on? “zeldman.com now accepts comments” — I don’t know quite why, but it makes me sad. or maybe just nostalgic for circa 2000, when I first discovered the mighty Z. (tags: blogosphere) [...]
Cleve Dore said on 16 February 2008 at 3:40 pm:

Right now I’m having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.

Comments off.

27 Jul 2006 1 pm eastern

Is this thing on?

121 Responses to “Is this thing on?”

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