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a tool's influenceI keep seeing flashes of text, sentence-bursts that I have the impulse to blog and then, inevitably, evaporate in a "nah, too short." I have no doubt that in my case not just the tool (movabletype) but also my weblog's design have influenced me to go for longer, article-like posts rather than the shorter posts we see elsewhere. Similarly, weblogs based on other tools (most notably Radio) tend to be more of a mix of snippets and medium-length posts with the occassional medium length article and only every once in a while a really long post... So what I've been wondering is, how to merge these two? Not just in terms of the tool (currently no tool seamlessly moves from one end of the spectrum to the next, at best, some provide plugins to deal with linkblogs, etc, and Radio has both "posts" and "stories" but the granularity isn't enough and stories are outside of the normal flow of the weblog). Also, in terms of the UI, navigation, and content evolution. A newspaper view comes to mind. I've been looking for something entertaining to do with PHP. Maybe this is it. Categories: technologyPosted by diego on February 13 2005 at 11:42 AM | TrackBack (3) Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).
See also Tom Coates musing around the same idea: Maybe just a "sentenceblog" or a supplementary "linklog" (possibly using del.icio.us) is what you're after? Posted by: Moof at February 14, 2005 12:18 AMTake a look at kottke. He blends the short links and "sentence bursts" in with the essays pretty well. What you want is Blogger. The old school one. I hit the same block last year: http://photomatt.net/2004/05/19/asides/ Posted by: Matt at February 16, 2005 9:15 PMWhat do you mean no tool moves seamlessly from lines to paragraphs to essays? That's exactly what the outliner for Scripting News does. Posted by: Dave Winer at February 18, 2005 11:11 PMThanks all for the comments! Joe: Kottke is close, but visually a bit abrupt in switching between modes for my taste. Matt: heh! Amazing how we keep revisiting ideas. Thanks for the link. Dave: I do think that Scripting News is close to what I was saying (although the design is in my opinion less oriented towards very long essays, which I sometimes like, and more short-to-medium-length posts), but I thought that was your own tool running against your own backend (or a modified Manila), and not generally available to the public, which is why I didn't mention it as an option for me. Please correct me if I'm wrong in that of course. In any case, I think Scripting is is a good example of how a flexible tool can aid in structures of different types and moving from one to another. Posted by: Diego at February 19, 2005 1:04 AMYou should be able to do something similar with Movable Type. Charles Miller integrates his linklog into his main weblog, and he's running MT. Another possibility is b2evolution,[1] which provides the ability to integrate a linklog into other weblogs. If neither of those does exactly what you want, you should check out Expression Engine.[2] It's not free software in either sense of the word, but it does allow you to create highly customized online publications. Of course, if you're just looking for an excuse to write your own weblog software in PHP, then go ahead. But from the reader's perspective, I haven't yet seen a home-built weblog system that is even as nice as WordPress - which I consider to be about the worst mainstream weblogging tool (speaking as a reader).[3] [1] http://b2evolution.net Post a comment
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