Adding UI for replies between blogs | Multiline Comment

Adding UI for replies between blogs<br>Borrowing a pattern from social media that can make blog posts feel a little more conversational.

Posted on<br>July

6,<br>2026

Category<br>Web

I spent years wishing for a better way to indicate when one of my posts is part of an ongoing series. You know the kind:

Annual birthday posts for Frankie

Monthly Time Machine posts

Weekly photo dumps

Average Apple Executive updates

etc.

The usual trick of linking text like “See previous post” at the beginning of the current post works OK enough, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

It wasn’t until last spring that it dawned on me: social media timelines are an ideal source of inspiration for visually representing one post that replies to another.

I’ve been using a little UI element on reply posts ever since, and it feels like such a natural part of the medium that it almost seems too obvious to share. But I’m jotting down my approach anyway in case anyone else wants to join the fun 🕺🪩

Reply GUI

After poking around different social media apps and platforms, I settled on a “Replying to ‘[title]’” UI element that borrows from the Mastodon client Elk:

There are lots of different ways to represent the same idea, but I liked this one because it’s a simple treatment that tucks nicely into my blog’s current design.

Even though I originally envisioned this feature for posts in a series, I found the format works just as well for replying to a post on someone else’s site, too 💫

Just tack on a simple “by [author]” and voila! A cross-blog reply:

After seeing lots of conversation bubbling up between blogs lately, it’s this second use case that I think feels especially interesting:

It’s immediately clear that a given post is part of a larger conversation

It gives a nice, prominent link to the original post, which is cool as hell 🤙

It’s familiar to anyone who has used social media

Elsewhere

Check out Dave Rupert’s “Link” posts to see the take he added a few months back 🌟

Is your blog sporting UI for reply posts? Shoot me a link on Mastodon, and I'll add it here!

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