Sunday, April 17, 2005

Sequels and Plickening Thots

Hey hey, I'm back. Wow, only one tiny typo in my first post, unless I just haven't discovered all of them yet.

Wow, five people commented! Thanks for the "welcome" posts orange, useless and pam.

(Hey I just noticed there is a spelling checker, fiddling around looking for how to make those three nicknames I just wrote into links I saw the spellcheck option. So I might as well confess that I do not use the things. Maybe after all these years they might actually work but I got put off realy badly by WordStar, remember WordStar? I don't mean WordStar for Windows, I mean, like DOS 3 maybe. I tried its spell-checker - maybe SpellStar, not sure, maybe just part of WordStar - and OUCH! Painful! The thing had no vocabulary! The authors apparently wated me to spend countless hours of my valuable time teaching their program English vocabulary (like, say, words in common use in British Traditional Witchcraft, for example... ;)) So thats why I don't use them. Fully a third of the words it complained about were actually spelt correctly it just didn't know them.)

OK, I have just found a need for a feature that I am not sure exists. I doubt I am the only person in all of the blog noosphere who'd like to write in hyertext, right? As in, have references be links to that which they refer to? So, in making those nicknames into links it'd've been nice to be able to right-click on the nick as it appears in the comments screen, or sweep over it with the mouse using a certain button, or some darn thing, to be able to load into a paste-buffer the whole linkishness of the nickname.

As it is, as I write this part I have only the first three nicks up above (the ones that were "just" a welcome, a point I was going to get to being as how hey, the other two actually had a contribution to make or a question to ask) and am about to turn them into links.

I dunno if you have noticed this yet but the way people's nicks show up when they post a comment is as a link to their profile, rather than, say, to some arbitrary page that they wanted to attract traffic to. So actually if there was (as there might well be, maybe I juzst haven't stumbled upon it yet) a quickie method of grabbing those nicks link and all for mention in a post it'd just be a link to their profile, not to their actual blog directly.

So hmm, what kind of linking should I be doing? Yikes how long is mere writing (oh wait, that is not "mere", that is "authoring") taking? How many hours per day does blogging actually take if one decides to really give it a good try?

I am thinking hey maybe what I should do is go like "so and so, of [link to their blog]", with their nick/name being a link to their profile. But how much work is that?!?! Not only will I have to actually visit their profile so as to get its URL into my browser's addres-ntry field so I can sweep it into my paste-buffer... I'll also have to find on their profile a link to their blog and visit that to get its URL too.

Plus, lets not forget that if for example they are using blogger (which seems likely don't you think, as in how likely is it, really, that blogger would let them use their profile [i]elsewhere[/i] when they post comments hmm) then they have the technology to have more than one blog! How would I choose which one to refer to? How would I know which one their comment (that is, they at the time they posted the comment) were "from" ???

Maybe I'll find they have "my welcoming and socialising blog", "my pointing out what folks should do next blog", "my attempts to pierce the viels of time to predict the future blog" and billions of others?!?!?

OK, OK, so that isn't that likely. They might only have millions, maybe even mere thousands. But in principle, in principle!

While I worry about how to mark-up the unfinished section above about the three folks who "just" posted welcomes, I might as well continue, so hey, next was ryan pointing out that after eleven days a sequel was due; and finally rocky inquired into the future as in hey will there be a sequel.

Notice that I have cunningly confused terms here, because I think quite likely rocky wasn't referring to a sequel of my first post but, rather, a sequel of my first blog.

So, to rocky, yes I expect there will be a sequel [this is the marketing technique known as "pre-selling", of which the proponent who comes most to my mind these days is Doctor Neil Shearing (sp?). I can point you at lots of great free educational material about pre-selling if you're interested, courtesy of said doctor and his whole "make your site sell" etc etc etc empire of excellent (but not cut-price if you get my drift) hosting and website-development and website-marketing services and materials] to the blog, and, as this post itself demonstrates (in case you meant sequel to my first post), also a sequel to that first post (available in a browser near you at THIS VERY SECOND!!! ;))

Darn I forgot to punch a timeclock (read: make a mental note of the actual clock time way back up there where I noticed that this could eat up quite a bit of time). I have however noticed that posts can be editted later. After all, I corrected a typo in my first post that way just before commencing this (my second) post. So, it is actually getting tempting right now to just publish the post-so-far and continue work on it later...

...which reminds me of a whole sequence of posts on my MakeMoney Knotwork site...

(What MakeMoney Knotwork site, you ask? [Go on, ask, ask!] Well gee, don't rush me, I'll get to that, have patience, the P-word as PIPSters call it. I will mark up this post eventually. Do you want me to author the darn thing or mark it up? Markup is an editorial job isn't it? So let me author the darn thing first THEN look for a markup tool that will run through it turning everything linkable into a link.

Aha, see how I have again cleverly moved things along toward yet another long-outstanding issue?

Well OK, maybe you didn't yet know that this even [i]was[/i] a long-outstanding issue. So hey, if ya didn't know, let me be the first to tell ya.

It has long been an issue that folks ideas of what constitute authoring tools seem to have gotten confused with layout tools or doodling/illustrating tools, or even typesetting tools.

I mean, like, look at all this GUI crap of drag and drop and so on, I mean hey yeah being able to drag commentator's nicks into the authoring window to link to them easily in posts would be nice but hey, is that even a feature the idiots in charge of authoring tools even thought of?

From my earliest exposures to hypertext the authoring tool that always seemed to me to be the most-needed was one that I still have not happened upon. A markup tool. Basically a tool that will turn words and phrases ("references" mostly, since just linking each word to its dictionary entry and each pixel to a page about the hue shade and intensity of that pixel and the qualities of that frequency of light and so on might be a kind of overkill, a kind of "too much information") into links.

I mean would it be so hard? Based on my experience with SpellStar (or WordStar's spellchecker anyway) even a spell-check tool expects its user to have to spend countless hours teaching it words. So saying that many of the links might need to be reviewed/approved by the user and many users might not think it was doing a good job until they had wasted huge swathes of their life working on it trying to teach it to do it right just doesn't seem to be any excuse for such a tool not to have been one of the first tools off the block way back when.

I mean how hard would it be? Turn any mention of any registered company or trademark into a link to the company's homepage, any mention of a nation into a link to that nation's homepage, any reference to a person into a link to that person's homepage and so on?

Well heh, at first it was hard because although Apple and IBM had homepages I dunno if even Dell did way back then. (I mean, like, the Mosaic era: pre-netscape...)

I really should time myself at this. I wonder if this one post has taken an entire hour yet? How many hours per post is normal in this business? ;) :)

So hey, I am going to save this now. I don't really see the point of saving it as a draught/draft as that sounds like it might mean that folks won't be able to see it. Or is there a "view draughts/drafts in progress option, a kind of "visit the artists in their studios" feature?

I will find out I guess. Oh but not at cost of having folks not see this. I'll post it as "published" first and [i]then[/i] look around (such as by going visiting the blogs of my commentators... ;)) to see if visitors have access to any kind of "see what drafts/draughts this author has in progess" feature...

So hey, will this be the end of this post? Will we meet again some blog page, same blog post or same blog page next blog post? Only time will tell...

[Time passes while the author nips off and hyperizes (hypericates? hyperificates? ;)) three nicks earlier written into an earlier part of this post... and no, he doesn't, as it turns out, actually hit the publish button yet nor even save a draught/draft though maybe a save an hour or maybe even more frequently might be wise? The author also realises that he has not yet found out - possibly the hard way - whether this authoring tool, loke some forums, has a session timeout so that if he nips off for a quick power-weekend-seminar and doesn't press the post button until he gets back the post might not take...]

Sheesh, maybe useless blogs should have an alternate nick: useless profiles

Aaaarg this input is weird. There does not seem to be any way of putting another character on the same line as the above useless profiles anchor without it being sucked into that link. I wanted to place a ! immediately following "profiles" but not as part of the link anchor. I want "useless profiles" to be the anchor, then have plaintext ! hard up agsinst it. As is, I cannot even put a space after the word, even a space just extends the anchor. Somehow this thing has gotten it into its head that only a linefeed (newline, end of line, carriage-return/linefeed pair, whatever it thinks it is using for linebreaks) can end an anchor?

Just trying to mark up the text is painfull, ouch. I heard today of a purported abilty to email posts to one's blog, maybe I am going to have to email raw HTML files written in a plain text editor, because as usual the main thins the stupid GUI (Grpahical User Interface) is doing is getting in the way, preventing the user from doing even the simplest and most trivial things such as inserting end-of-anchor tags. Sheesh. Its a wonder that GUI folks ever get anything done at all. Visualise them having to go browsing through an iconic online dictionary looking for the icon of the word they want to type because they are not allowed to type actual alphanumeric characters they are only allowed to type pre-made pre-approved letter-co,binations that someone else once upon a time not only decided to permit as a legitimate word but also to permit the paricular use, under certain probably very limited (not to mention expensive oh what the heck lets mention that too) conditions, to use...

How many thousands of commands do I have in the /bin and /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin etc etc directories of my machine? Thats a lot of icons even if I only had to choose an icon or menu-entry for each entire application or command.

Look I would not mind these stupid garbage GUI pieces of crap if they at least didn't get in the way of simply doing stuff. But when they start to breask stuff they are going too far. The text input widget seems to be broken by whatever tricks this thing is using that hide from me even the target of the links I have made.

In a proper text-input widget I wouldn't even be seeing the links I've made as live links, I'd be seeing the actual code of the link, all the optional and hidden fields etc. This thing right now wont even show me what the targets are of the links by hoevering the mouse over them so that my browser's status line will tell me. That is because they are not real links. I cannot even click on them to find out where they go. So what the heck use is it to me to have the important info about them - to wit, what/where they are linked to - be hidden?

I did in fact resort to saving as draft/draught.

Guess what?

There is no view option for a draft/draugh FOR THE AUTHOR! It will let me load the draft/draught back into this stupid pathetic editor garbage but aso what, what the heck use is that, suppose I come back next millenia or nanosecond or whatever and wonder what the heck I thought I was gonna link to?

Seems like the only way that even the author can find out what the heck the thing ended up linking to is to publish.

So hey, my hands are forced. I have no choice, it seems, but to publish unfinished posts as the only way to actially get a decent look at them as I go. Like wow, no preview button. Sheesh, I am so used to phpBB (which, by the way, probably unlike this blogger software I am for some braindead reason wasting time with, is free open source software so that not only can anyone use it on their own machines but also anyone can try to fix it if they think it is broken) that having no preview option when posting is weird, very weird. Who the heck came up with this tihng anyway? This isn't the way that real blog software - as in the stuff you can download and install on your own servers - works is it?

Oh and as to why I am wasting time on crap that isn't even free open source - blame that on Michael Russell, as I said in my first post it was his "20 steps" lesson that led me to come here to do this. Personally if I had wanted a blog I'd probably've installed one myself on one of my own machines. As far as I know we're only using this crap here because Google bought it and thus Google spiders it fanatically thus folks lacking in google-spider-popularity might need to go through this crap. But hey, that is not me! Google crawls all over my sites constantly, has done so ever since Google started.

Sheesh the crap I put myself through for the sake of "the common user", to find out what crap "the common user" gets put through by the marketing morons who use theuir evil drug "money" to pervert the ideals and principles of anything and everything they can lay their wallets on (or maybe even jsut anything they can lay...)

-MarkM-