Continuing the discussion from Please Read The Comments:
My main objection is that I don’t want the entire content duplicated on both sides. What if I modify the blog post? Then I have to change it in two places.
Also, I think the points most people want to make are better served by summaries than directly quoting individual lines of the original blog post.
I made this a site setting called embed_truncate. If checked (not by default) it embed the full post.
I have to agree with you here Jeff. Having your entire blog posts here would defeat the point of having **blog.**codinghorror.com. This site would essentially become your blog, to me at least.
Agreed - keep the full content over on the blog. However, it would be nicer if the link to the actual blog post was a little more prominent.
I guess it’s a bit more like Hacker News at that point @sam_saffron – we are posting links and commenting on the content at the links.
(That’s not all you can do here – you can also create your own discussion topics, which can be complete posts of course, but the blog category certainly is that way.)
Should Hacker News “embed the entire post”?
I think, “its complicated” is the best answer I can give here. For HN it is not practical from all sort of legal reasons to embed. It is not an option they even have. Would it be better, unlikely, the format for embedding would be crazy.
In your playground it is an option, you are blogging in strict markdown and it would enable slightly richer modes of interaction. I prefer having the richer mode of interaction, in particular the clean “quote” without jumping windows. I totally get that neither solution is a clear win on every front.
I agree with on on this @sam_saffron. Content (blog post in this case) and associated comments should always be of the same page/tab.
Opening of 2 tabs is one issue but disconnect between content and comments is another bigger issue, I guess.
@codinghorror Can’t we put discourse comments at the bottom of the the blog post? like Disqus?
Or may be I’ll get accustomed to this ‘gap’ overtime 
@codinghorror if reader wants to read the comments then it can be done on the same page as blog post but if she need to write anything then she has to move to other tab… that’s kinda weird to me.
Either you:
keeping read and write access separately seems like confusion to me. (may be it’s only me )
Maybe @sam and @eviltrout the best option is a button to expand the full post in an <iframe>? Like this?
A script to show the full BB post on BBS - meta - Boing Boing BBS
Go to a BoingBoing comment thread and click on the bookmark you just made. All this does is finds the first link in a thread and opens it up in an iframe inline with the page.
We should probably formalize that – best of both worlds, you can click a button to see the “full” blog post inline with the topic, without repeating it in two places.
@eviltrout just built a Show Full Post button which appears under the summary:
Clicking / tapping that will dynamically load the full post.
I personally think this is the best of both worlds – @create812, @xangelo, @saurabh_hooda, @sam let me know what you think.
That looks perfect actually. Link to the post is prominent, but it shows that it is still secondary to the discussion.
@codinghorror : Sorry, this doesn’t look the best solution to me. I still feel that having comments on the same web page as blog is the best solution. Fred wilson’s blog (avc.om) has lively discussion on every topic and still it’s well managed. I am sure that there are several moderators in those sea of comments but finding a good moderator from your community is very much possible (and you’ve shown that with stackoverflow).
On the other hand Seth Godin’s blog is also very popular but it doesn’t run comments. But that is fine, people have accepted it that way.
Having comments but on different webpage makes the reader disenchanted in commenting. I feel that over time only the most loyal readers will be the only ones who comment (and that might increase quality of discussion?) while rest of the folks will either
This is what I feel Jeff.
I just tried it out and like it quite a lot, the extra click is not too much pain. It makes a large amount of interaction with your blog way simpler.
For some reason the expanding button doesn’t work for me when I’m logged out.
On a side note, if I go to http://discourse.codinghorror.com/ while logged out it renders pure json.
This raises an interesting question on what compels people to comment on a blog post. For me, I see the interesting discussion in the ‘highlights from the comments’ that are on the bottom - and decide its worth joining the conversation.
The flipside is that as the difficult rises, so does the ‘strength of feeling’ that someone must feel before they are compelled to express their negativity - so negative comments may be more extreme.
I think we’d needs find a sweet-spot between people knee-jerking their comments, valuable discussions, and dealing with people’s emotions.
Ze Frank’s ‘meta’ discussion about the comments on YouTube illustrates the issue quite well:
