Posts on the blog have a Creative Commons license – anything can be freely used elsewhere so long as it is a non-commercial purpose and attributed. That's always indicated at the bottom of the page.
With the Garden, I decided to remove that license. The garden is like my personal wiki, my scratchpad, where I can plan and build, and what I build here may turn into anything. The WordPress version of the Garden hosted the working copy of "It's Only Words" which will be released in book form so this isn't the kind of thing I want freely used elsewhere.
There's something in the air. Both Jan and James have been looking at ways to post replies/responses on their blogs, and send webmentions, without those replies showing on their sites and in their feeds.
It's a nice idea.
The only issue is that webmentions are supported by so few sites, it's not really worth it for me to implement something like this. Yet.
If using brid.gy to send replies to social networks without having to actually use those networks then maybe. But I don't. Having to check if a site accepts webmentions before replying is a bit much.
I actually got inspired by James and implemented the feature easily using the “status” property I already had for marking posts as drafts. I wonder why I didn't do this earlier. I often didn't reply to some posts just because I didn't want to post to my public feed.
Pete Moore replied:
I read your blog post about keeping replies off your timeline, and I thought that was a really interesting idea. So much so that I considered taking GoBlog for a spin, but seeing as I know next to nothing about Go I'm doubting that will go well. :)
@colinwalker Indeed :) Unlisted posts may be the only way to truely "own" all of your content across the web without overloading your main feed. People subscribe to my blog (I hope?) because they like my writing or are interested in what I'm writing about – they probably don't want to the "listen" to every conversation I'm having on the web. Unlisted posts seems to be the only way to do that (though I Imagine they'd still get spidered eventually).
Colin Walker replied:
I can appreciate it more when you put it like that. Replies are definitely underused on my blog and I think I've only ever used them in a context that is consistent with other posts so never really considered they might not be wanted.
It's a strange situation as following a feed means you get everything (unless it's something like a category feed) whether it interests you or not and, sometimes, getting those items you might not normally think you'd be interested in can take you on wild flights of discovery.
In any event, I need to reconsider how my likes and replies work so that I can better separate the webmention from the content.
