Thursday, November 11, 2004
Mighty Morphin' Power Blogs
Tonight, this blog has quietly polymorphed into a vastly more sophisticated entity. Well, not really - nor is this post, itself, very long, despite what the link said. But in the background, we have added several elements of functionality, using all kinds of neat tech.
Using PHP, we now include a second blog... the Quote of the Day. This is a fully discrete second blog, displayed on the same page as the first. My immediate blogging goal is to keep this one updated daily, even if the main blog isn't.
Using CSS, we can now show/hide the bulk of long posts. I'm DAMN proud of this mod, because I was able to find three distinct tutorials on different ways to do this trick, and all of them leave a "Read More" link on every post, whether you invoked the tech on that post or not. I want it to show up only on those posts which actually use the feature... and you would not believe how bloody tricky it is. One thorough backrub to the first one who can describe how I did it.
Coming up later tonight, if it works, XML technology brings you webfeed (aka RSS feed) tech, so that anyone who wants to can monitor whether this blog has updated without having to check. That's right... detect lollybloggers at range! Soon to come will be links to tutoriae on how to pull this off, so that I no longer have to check your lollyblogging manually. Yes, you.
This is all research, honest. Research for the DemosFire project. For those who haven't received this document, it's a funky plan of mine which has about eighty elements to it, but is ultimately a plan to create an implementation engine for powerful online discussion and direct democracy. For those who have, research indicates that about half of the elements I dreamed up for this, are not completely new... but in combination, and combined with the ones which do appear to be unprecedented, I'm still really pumped about this project. To put it into terms I'm just starting to learn, I believe that the DemosFire engine may turn out to be a webfeed (RSS feed) reader, with a weighted-volume standard all its own, and an encrypted Trust Scheme feed for the direct democracy part.
As bonus points for those who did receive the document, answer me this:
With Trust Schemes in place, do "Motions" aka "Proposals" or "Initiatives" actually have to be marked as such? Clarify why, or why not.
Using PHP, we now include a second blog... the Quote of the Day. This is a fully discrete second blog, displayed on the same page as the first. My immediate blogging goal is to keep this one updated daily, even if the main blog isn't.
Using CSS, we can now show/hide the bulk of long posts. I'm DAMN proud of this mod, because I was able to find three distinct tutorials on different ways to do this trick, and all of them leave a "Read More" link on every post, whether you invoked the tech on that post or not. I want it to show up only on those posts which actually use the feature... and you would not believe how bloody tricky it is. One thorough backrub to the first one who can describe how I did it.
Coming up later tonight, if it works, XML technology brings you webfeed (aka RSS feed) tech, so that anyone who wants to can monitor whether this blog has updated without having to check. That's right... detect lollybloggers at range! Soon to come will be links to tutoriae on how to pull this off, so that I no longer have to check your lollyblogging manually. Yes, you.
This is all research, honest. Research for the DemosFire project. For those who haven't received this document, it's a funky plan of mine which has about eighty elements to it, but is ultimately a plan to create an implementation engine for powerful online discussion and direct democracy. For those who have, research indicates that about half of the elements I dreamed up for this, are not completely new... but in combination, and combined with the ones which do appear to be unprecedented, I'm still really pumped about this project. To put it into terms I'm just starting to learn, I believe that the DemosFire engine may turn out to be a webfeed (RSS feed) reader, with a weighted-volume standard all its own, and an encrypted Trust Scheme feed for the direct democracy part.
As bonus points for those who did receive the document, answer me this:
With Trust Schemes in place, do "Motions" aka "Proposals" or "Initiatives" actually have to be marked as such? Clarify why, or why not.
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