This blog doesn’t have comments. (Some of the older posts contain archived comments from back when it was a WordPress blog, but newer posts don’t.) It’s partially a technical matter – the blog is now prebaked with Octopress, meaning it’s just a lump of static HTML files that get generated when I update, so there’s no dynamic engine that would handle comments.

There are technical solutions (like Facebook and Disqus), but as I said, the problem is only partially technical. I’ve been lucky that most of the comments made on this blog were good, but when they were bad they were really bad. The worst have been removed, but there are still some left from cantankerous folks who had to say their pieces. More recently, I’ve gone on record as being against comments on the internet. While that twitter account began half in jest, I feel like I’m now obligated to maintain its stance. Frankly, comments here have only ever been a wash, so I don’t feel like I’m losing much.

But! That does not mean that I don’t like hearing from people. Especially people who disagree with me, and especially if they disagree with me in an interesting way! I just don’t think that comments sections at the bottom of the page are the best way of interacting. If you want to respond to anything you find written here, feel free to get in touch with me. Either tweet at me (not that Twitter’s a great place for nuanced discussions either, but it can be a good start to back-and-forth), email me (by solving the very simple riddle on the contact page), or write a post of your own and let me know about it via one of those two methods. I’m more than willing to update a post, link to your opposition piece, or write another post where I sum up your disagreement.

So in summary: Discussions good; Comments bad.

But let’s chat!