Thank you for your interesting post @nigelfreeney .
As you know, Connect is essentially a blog where users start posts in one of a number of specific topics such as Photography, Travel, Food & Drink, Local Stories etc., and containing text and images as you’ve done here, and other users reply in kind to these original posts, as I’ve done here. Altogether an original post and its replies can be thought of as a thread. The original posts can also have tags and a language (a special tag) attributed to further categories them and these tags can be thought of as sub-topics which help when users search for posts.
Unlike other “social media” type platforms like Facebook, Insta and Pinterest etc., Connect does provide Original Posters with some, albeit limited, post formatting capability and also allows users to vary the display format such as the sorting order of topics. However, there are limitations (e.g. the post character size limit and very limited HTML functionality) and almost from the very start the leaderboard posts hit these limits. This forced me to come up with ways of achieving my objectives within the constraints of the platform.
However, when it comes to connecting different threads and/or specific reply comments within these, as you mention I so often do, one needs to use the URL links of the original posts and the replies. A good example of this is the star photos leaderboards posts such as the October 2022 Star Photos Leaderboards post. In this monthly post you will see hundreds of “hot links” to individual star photo replies of the hundreds of participating Local Guides “stored” in what I sometimes refer to as the photo album of star photos post. In this way we have a beautiful “tapestry” of tightly interconnected posts and replies all done specifically to provide the best possible user experience of the Top 100 leaderboard posts readers. One can very quickly and easily move from any listing on one of the different leaderboards in the Top 100 post and land on the specific Local Guide’s star photo with it’s full details including an image of the star photo. Within the above mentioned character limitations of Connect, I also cram as much information as I possibly can into the URLs of each star photo listing on the leaderboards, including for example the Google Maps category, and the name of the Place of Interest that the star photos relate to. I mention all this, as aside of the inter-connectivity of the leaderboard posts themselves, there’s quite a lot additional information content. Another example of this is the addition of the country flags of each Local Guide listed in the Country leaderboard posts.
So while it is essentially just a blog, you can create a series of inter-connected posts on Connect but it does take a lot of planning and design, not to mention the time and effort.
Finally, I wanted to also briefly comment on your hidden dog find at the top of the 60 metre Columbus Monument tower, in Barcelona. Things like this always fascinate me and I often find myself digging deeper and researching, trying to find what the meaning of these “hidden” gems are! Gargoyles are good examples of this and I’d love to write a post about it. If I only had time!
