Since I haven't posted on the Typelists yet which our kind hosts have provided for us with the sweat of their brow and their butts firmly applied to their Ikea chairs, I will say that the book and music lists are schweeet. Cannot recommend that highly enough.
Now, as I've been beta testing, I've been thinking a lot about what I would want in a nextgen tool. This has been forcing me to sit down and write while I'm writing, i.e., metawriting, which is probably what the rest of this post is going to be, so if you're not into all this, go catch some zzz and catch me tomorrow.
If you're still here...
OK, one of the most important things I want to be able to do is to connect my own posts to one another meaningfully. When blogs used to be a great deal about links (good ones, bad ones, funny, weird, "I kiss You!" and like that...) the most important thing was to store the link and slap a date on it.
But if you tend to write longer portions, and links are not the majority of your content, and you have some linear narrativity to it all, then the ability to have a sidebar that would pop up all your posts in a particular category or keyword would be super -- just throw the link into the new post and write "Remember when I was talking about this? (and "this" would be the link to the previous post in question.)
This also goes for comments, and updating.
I keep thinking about footnotes and citations. I'm obsessed by footnotes anyway: I wrote a gossip column that used them, I write them in notes I leave for family members, I even stuck a couple in a math exam last term. I find that when I need to digress (and that's like, always) they're your best friend. But alas, there's no footnoting mechanism. Nor citation (aside from a "via" for links, or quotes.) But there's no way to stick these somewhere so you can put together a sort of virtual bibliography for your readers: who are you quoting, how often? What are your sources? What is that thing you just mentioned that I have absolutely no idea of what it is, and I know you didn't define it since it would ruin the flow of the story you're telling?
Like that. In fact a "terms/definitions" category would rock -- you could not only keep them around for using with tech blogs (e.g., explaining RDF before someone emails you this: "What's all this RDF? Did you misspell RSS or something?") but you could define a set of terms that are unique to you, or you and friends use(e.g., "Archetypo: Not unlike a Freudian slip, but in print".) Then they could be aggregated and an almost real-time jargonwatch could be available.
I'm still hashing this out, and am most likely going to keep doing so, and then perhaps build something (that will either interface with my existing MT work or will stand alone on PHP), and then of couse school will start and my head will explode. But until then, I'm a workin' on it...
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