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Formatting Experiments
Are you tired of your ambivalent imbroglio? Is it wearing out, grating on your nerves, or making your eyes cry out with boredom or clutter? Is your imbroglio just too darned tired? Well never fear! Experiments are here! In the next few weeks I'm going to be hella busy, so there's no better time to embark on a redesign of ai. At least, there's no better time to plan for such a thing and talk about it and wish I could do it, even if I don't actually get around to it. First up, I'd like to change the posting pattern around here. For some time I've admired the rather unique way Dave Winer posts on Scripting News. The format seems to be that anything post that's more than a short paragraph gets its own title, while anything that's just an observation or pointer to somewhere else just gets a line or two. The key is that all of these posts—both the longer, titled ones, and the untitled snippets—get permalinks. The colored permalink symbols (#) at the end of the snippets mark the transition from one snippet to the other. The only slightly incongruous element of this method is that the titled posts get a permalink at the top (after the title) instead of at the end, like the snippets. Winer does not allow comments on any of his posts. Anyway, I've been thinking of a convenient way to do something similar to Scripting News here at ai, because it would allow me to eliminate the ambivalent bits sidebar and just incorporate those kinds of links into the main body of the blog each day. That would simplify the design of the page, and would also make archives more meaningful because everything posted on a given day would end up in the same place. Does anyone have any thoughts on how to accomplish this? One idea is simply to create one post per day. Within the post, each “item” would get an anchor on the end. Longer posts would also be components of the single daily post, but they'd have titles, and again, an anchor at the end. I can't decide whether to allow comments on everything, or just on the longer bits. What do you think? Or does it even matter? Perhaps I'll just try it and see. As food for thought, Andrew Raff (who was actually the original inspiration for ambits) has developed something like this on his blog. However, his short items don't have permalinks or comment/trackback links. The cool bit is that they are clearly distinct content because they appear w/a light grey background. Perhaps I'll try out something like this, as well. When any of this will happen, I can't say. For now, these are just ideas I hope to play with. The larger redesign will probably eliminate the ability to “transmogrify ai” (change color schemes), simply because I don't think that adds much value for anyone. I wanted to see if I could make it work, and now that I have, well, it's not as fun anymore. I'm also considering:- Upgrading to MT 3.14. This I will definitely do, possibly today. I'd really kind of like to move to an open source platform (i.e. WordPress), but that will require far more time than I have in the foreseeable future.
- Adding a CAPTCHA comment requirement, although Preaching to the Perverted says his didn't work as well as hoped.
- Creating a changeable photo-header, again, much like Scripting News (the Scripting News header photo changes at Winer's whim, usually every couple of months or so, I'd say).
- Editing the blogroll to a more manageable number of links and putting the rest elsewhere. I've been playing with del.icio.us and it looks like it might make a great link manager. This looks like a fairly easy way to include your list of links on a page via the del.icio.us RSS feed, so maybe I'll play with that.
- General simplification to make the page read more easily and load faster.
Posted January 8, 2005 08:05 PM | meta-blogging
For what it's worth, I've gotten absolutely zero spam since implementing my CAPTCHA-style solution. While it doesn't look like it would be difficult for optical-character recognition software to solve, there is one big advantage that the blogosphere has that Yahoo and Hotmail don't. Because there are so many CAPTCHA solutions out there, it's very difficult to design a hack that deals with all of them.
At least that's my theory. In the meantime, it's working, so if you're looking to take the burden of MT-Blacklist administration of your back, the two hours max it would take you to set it up is a good investment.
Posted by: A. Rickey at January 8, 2005 09:10 PM
I just upgraded to 3.14, but I haven't decided whether to do the CAPTCHA either. So far the only thing I've changed is the name of the comment cgi file. Hopefully that will do something.
I like the "bits." ;-)
Posted by: yasmín at January 8, 2005 10:38 PM
I think all major re-design or new server implementations should be done when facing very important looming deadlines at work or school. I always seem to work best that way... :)
I've considered a move to WordPress, too. However, I have never really gotten around to it (1) because of some loyalty to SixApart who I like very much in general; and (2) pure laziness.
I did hit on what seems to be a good way to reduce the content and trackback spam. First, I implemented the SCode CAPTCHA. As I mentioned, that gave me mixed results. However, I did then (on the advice of SixApart) go back and close old posts to comments and trackbacks. Anything older than 30 days gets closed. That seems to have worked. For the past 5 days, I have gotten zero comment or trackback spams! Now I just need to automate it... yeah, well, it's on my "to do" list anyway.
In Limine has a rotating photo header, and I think he's running MT... you might ask if he'll share his hack.
I think del.icio.us is the f'ing coolest thing since sliced bread. It took me about a week to "get" the zen of del.icio.us, but man, now I think I would be crippled without it.
As for Winer's posting style, it's a side effect of using Radio. Radio does permalinks that way (at least, if I recall). I started with Radio, actually, but moved to MT some time ago. Winer just posts a lot of crap. Personally, I hate the idea of disabling comments altogether, I think it's a slap in the face to the idea of the "blogsphere" but then again, I've never been a fan of Winer. For all his "hippie-esq" talk, he can be downright meanspirited sometimes... dishes it out, but certainly can't take it. Anyway, I'm completely off subject... the point, really, was that I like comments. They might not be necessary for all posts, but I think eliminating them altogether, well, sucks.
You might also take a look at Purple Numbers, which was actually developed by an old friend of mine. I really like the idea behind them, but like Tim Bray, I had some slight differences with the implementation, many of which are purely aesthetic. So I never got around to adding them... :)
Posted by: Dave! at January 9, 2005 12:37 AM
Well, it's good to hear the CAPTCHA thing is worthwhile. I'll try to implement it here and see what happens. I thought about closing old comments, but I hate to do that since every once in a while somebody leaves a great comment on an old post.
I also started out using Radio (I actually started blogging by manually updating a page via straight up HTML and FTP, then I moved to blogger, but they seem to have deleted my account, probably because I hadn't logged in in so long). I'd forgotten that Radio sort of automatically puts that permalink at the end of each item. Now it makes more sense. Thanks also for the pointer to the purple numbers. I might look into something like that, too.
Oh, but when I said I wanted to change the format of posts, I didn't mean I wanted to remove the ability to comment on things. I agree that comments are essential, so they'll be around probably as long as this blog...
Posted by: ambimb at January 9, 2005 10:59 AM
I stole, er, derived the technique for the integrated links and weblog movable typing from Matt of Hit-or-Miss.org.
On my site, the linky links actually do have permalinks, but are not linked from the front page. I gave up on comments after a while, since the ratio of actual comments to spam was close to zero. Additionally, attaching all short link posts with "(0c)" or "(0c) (0tb)" simply became distracting.
Posted by: Andrew at January 10, 2005 03:48 PM
Cleaning up the blogroll. Fun. I just did it. Alice (Mad Tea Party) is effectively gone. Liable's site is now a cheesy Chevy Blazer ad. So Sue Me must have been sued out of existence - blogger can't find it.
As for spam, a fellow blogger told me to close comments after a few days; I now close them five days after I post, and that's cut down on spam. As soon as I leave them open longer (or go weeks without posting, as I did during finals), I get spam galore. But thanks for the ideas; I'll pass them on to my webhostess..
Five more months to go, then reality sets in...
Posted by: greg at January 11, 2005 12:36 AM
Hmm. For whatever reason, your comments don't like my real email: gregzbylut at msn dot com.
Posted by: greg at January 11, 2005 12:37 AM
Andrew: Thanks for that link! I might go that route -- someday when I have the time. I was thinking of using tiny icons for comments and trackback links, but you're right, they may be annoying. I tend to write a little more than the headline in my little quicklinks, so maybe the comment/tb links wouldn't be so bad if each item is more than one line already. Maybe.
Greg: Sorry about that. Maybe some banned string in Blacklist matches part of your address? Or maybe the new DSBL thing is blocking your IP for some reason. I'll try to look into this soon. But congratulations on being so close to being done!
Posted by: ambimb at January 11, 2005 08:16 AM
