Spare Idea: Linked Follow-up Posts
Referring to posts made in the past is easy. What about the possibility of referring to posts in the future?
Often we’ll come across a bit of media news, such as the announcement of Google’s intentions to IPO. Obviously, such news doesn’t end there and its followed up, for example, with news of Microsoft’s rejected offer to “merge” with (ie, acquire) Google. However, in some cases, follow-ups happen months down the track.
Now, applying this to regular blog posts, sometimes people post about things that are in-progress. Visitors sometimes surf in, read a post, such as “I applied for Youth Allowance today”, and are interested in the outcome. Not being a daily visitor, they arrive back a month or two later, wondering if the application succeeded. Instead of having to trawl through a whole bunch of posts, wouldn’t it be good to be able to go back to an old post, and be able to find follow-ups from there?
Or if someone’s surfing through archives (maybe they arrived at the archive page through a search engine), and they want to find a follow-up post, it’d be good to be able to easily do that.
Now obviously, everything you make a follow-up post, you could go back to your old post and insert a link to the follow-up, but that’s a hassle. Here’s a solution. Perhaps someone would like to implement it in their CMS… I don’t have the time.
When writing a post that you know you will follow up in future, you flag it for follow up. So perhaps next to the post footer, which may read “Link | Comments (4)”, you add a little note, such as “Link | Comments (4) | To be followed up in future”. The last bit is a link to email the website’s owner to remind them to follow up the post if they’ve forgotten about it.
All the posts which are flagged are added to a combo box on the page where someone writes a new post (in this way it’s hard to forget posts which you were going to follow up, because the list is there everytime you make a new post). When you make a new post, you can select if it is a follow-up, and link it to the appropriate post via the combo box.
For the new post, the footer would be “Link | Comment (1) | Continuation from post #70”. The old post’s footer would be renamed to “Link | Comments (4) | Followed up in post #120”. You could also mark the new post for follow-up, and in this way you could daisy chain a series of ongoing posts.
Technically speaking, all you’d really need to do is add three extra fields to the table where posts are stored: followup (boolean), before, after. Before and after would be links to the relevant post IDs. Followup would, of course, be the flag that a post needs to be followed up. Add a bit of code and that’s it.
12:09am (GMT +11.00) tomorrow 
I have one issues with this system. It’s not fatal, but I’ll mention it anyway.
In the system you describe, follow-ups are one-dimensional (each post can have one and only one post before and after it). Suppose there are two things you want to follow up on in a post, that are really separate threads. You can’t. Or suppose that something happens that is relevant to more than one previous post. You have to follow up on them separately. As I said, not a show-stopper, but it’s something you might need at some stage.
Instead of having tields for “before” and “after” in the posts table, put them in their own table. I’m sure you’re familiar enough with relational database theory/practice to know where I’m going with this. And have a multi-list instead of a combo box.
Also, you might want to be able to follow up posts even if they haven’t been marked for followup… just a thought, not sure of an easy way to do it UI-wise.
“Issue” is, of course, singular. My bad.
Shish has a good point. I think the emailing the author idea can go, personally, so that posts don’t need to be flagged for followup. Then you don’t need to change the posts table at all, just add a couple of tables to handle the references. Sure it would either make your queries required to format the page more complicated, or need more of them (increasing server load), but that’s something you’d have to deal with …
Oh well, that’s my $0.02, off to test this Half-Life 2 beta..
Sure, if you want the extra complexity of posts being related to other posts in a one-to-many relationship, you can add an additional table to manage that, eg: [followup_id (primary key), post_id (foreign key), parent_post_id (foreign key)] (you could dump the primary key if you wanted). The tradeoff of course, is the expense of doing table joins (or at least querying an additional table), and fiddling around with the UI as you mentioned.
For example, if I wanted to mark a post for several follow-ups, how would I do that? I’d need to be able to specify a number of threads, and then “name” each of them to follow-up. A bit too much work for what should otherwise be a very simple, yet somewhat useful, feature. The returns for time invested start to diminish :)
I still think you need to mark posts for follow-up, because it’s easy to forget what you have to follow-up sometimes.
Also, there’s nothing to prevent you from following-up posts even if they haven’t been marked for follow-up, just mark it retrospectively and link it straight away to the new post.
Also you could make your posts participate in a many-to-many relationship with other posts, for which you’d need a composite table. That’s if one post actually follows up topics raised in multiple prior posts. But that would be starting to get ridiculous from a practical point of view.
Ridiculous, maybe… but cool. Eventually all posts could be interconnected, and the linear text vie Hear Ye! would be nothing more than a traversal of Stu Space.
And then you could plot it.
Okay, maybe it’s not practical, I just like the idea. :)
Hmmm… plotting it against a time dimension. I like that actually! But on sites like this it would mostly be a bunch of points :)
Depends how much you use it. It’d be a bunch of points now because there’s no followup feature. I think if you started using it you’d find more correlations than you thought there were.
Also I have a suspicion that having your entire site interlinked like that would probably put you firmly on most search engine crawlers’ ‘Marked for Death’ lists ;p