7 ms·

Blog Or Get Off The Pot (2006)

66 points by platz 14y ago

GhotiFish 14y ago
"Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?" Voting on good or bad articles for a blog? This is a good idea. "For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments are ordered chronologically, just like the entries." Comments along the side, remarking on the story as it goes? This is a good idea. "And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes -- heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me, because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version" Diffs? This is a good idea. "All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds." This is a good extension of the previous idea. "When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern- matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?" ... uhm. Well 4 in a row aint bad.
- scribu 14y ago
  It's pretty sad that, 7 years later, all these good ideas still haven't been incorporated into any mainstream web publishing tool in a coherent way. The closest we have to inline comments is the Google Docs interface and StackOverflow uses and exposes revisions, but neither has a self-hosted version.
  - psycr 14y ago
    As Steve identifies in his post, I think that the critically difficult part is applying versioning to multiple degrees of the content: the prima facie post itself, but also the inline comments, etc. In a sense, you'd have to have some kind of conflict resolution. Git could be an inspiration here. Should anyone be interested in experimenting/prototyping a system like this - I'm up for a weekend hack or so. My contact information is in my profile.
    - scribu 14y ago
      I just realized that Github's pull requests UI handles this pretty well: You can leave a comment on a particular line in the diff and the comment will be collapsed if you update the code and the diff gets outdated, but the UI will still show you the original chunk you commented on.
  - MichaelGG 14y ago
    The suggested commenting system was sorta implemented by Microsoft a long time ago (IE5?). Internet Explorer had a plugin called "Discussions" or "Discuss" or something to that effect. It let you have comment threads on any webpage, without involving the actual site. I'm not sure if there was a public service, or it was more of an Intranet type thing. I do recall seeing the Discuss button in IE much later then IE5, and a quick search shows plenty of people asking what it is, so it mustn't have been too obscure a feature.
    - dasil003 14y ago
      Google had that too. Can't remember what it was called though.
      - bjxrn 14y ago
        Google Sidewiki?
        dasil003 14y ago
        There you go.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Even on the last one, once I parsed the sentence, I thought that was a good idea, too :). Configuration should run on a sort of prototype basis, where it can be specialized at any point in whatever processing chain is at work... Excuse me, I need to rewrite some code.
- kenferry 14y ago
  OmniWeb has per-site CSS overrides and site prefs! It's actually quite nice. That's a feature I miss.
- Tomis02 14y ago
  "When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?" Opera has per-site configuration options.
  - lsh 14y ago
    Better yet, when you go to modify your per-site config (right click -> edit site preferences) you can add wildcards to the site ... for example, I could turn on cookies for *.ycombinator.com
- mseebach 14y ago
  It's a great idea. It's called "Google Wave".
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
martinced 14y ago
Regarding the fact that you can edit blogs after the fact, he writes: "...that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me" (btw I just love Steve Yegge. Guys like him and pg brought me to Emacs and Lisps: thanks.) I'm exactly on the same tune there: editing something after other people have already commented just feel dishonest. That's my biggest problem with SO: people can actually edit other's questions. For that reason alone things like Usenet / Google groups are much better: no revisionism can take place there. A system where you can clearly see the edits (and always see them) would be much better than all these "wiki-style" blogs and Q/A sites where people can actually modify what others meant. Wikis are great for stuff like Wikipedia: where people collaborate on a topic. But people don't "collaborate" on a SO question (on answers maybe, but on questions no way) just as people don't "collaborate" on a blog entry. Edits, when allowed, should be clearly visible. To me Yegge is spot on: there's a dishonesty issue at work here.
cocoflunchy 14y ago
Unrelated comment directed at @martinced who commented on this page: you have been hellbanned, all your comments from the past 3 days are marked as dead even though they are (as far as I can judge) relevant and thought out.
- RobotCaleb 14y ago
  Since the point of hellbanning is to not let the afflicted in on it, is it frowned upon to inform others of such status?
  - kami8845 14y ago
    If people are actually contributing, letting them know that they have been hellbanned is good for the community.
  - mcav 14y ago
    It's often a mystery why people get hellbanned.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    It would be frowned upon if the hellbanned user was trolling or flaming.
- dasil003 14y ago
  I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the PyCon incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently woman-hating psychopaths during that whole debacle. I'm not saying that's the case here (I haven't looked), but it's an interesting question as to whether such individuals, having returned to a facade of sanity, should be allowed back into the discussion.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the PyCon incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently woman-hating psychopaths during that whole debacle. Alternatively, it could be that several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently politically correct, hell-banning for no much reason psychopaths during the whole debate.
kislayverma 14y ago
I haven't checked it out in detail, but Jeff Atwood's 'Discourse' (http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/) does seem to have some of this stuff. It's a forum, but I wonder if it could be used as a blog. And although I agree that the prevalent blogging software could use some lovin', but I hardly think it is as broken as the article seems to imply.
natural219 14y ago
This article isn't about blogging software. To me, it was about the challenges of starting any project. Whenever I have an idea, I find that implementing that idea produces a fractal of ideas for how to make that implementation easier -- I always want a blogging platform that "just does this bit automatically", or I want my development tools to behave exactly the way I want them to, which ends up hindering my actual doing of the damn thing.
hkon 14y ago
His points make me think of Google Wave. I find myself missing the wave all the time, and the competing products xxx don´t come close.
nagrom 14y ago
"For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments are ordered chronologically, just like the entries." Isn't this what Rap Genius does?
- jpwagner 14y ago
  I may misunderstand, but it seems that rap genius has a specific type of annotation (ie best explanation rather than comment-thread). I think the OP's suggestion is more similar to how soundcloud does comments.
  - nagrom 14y ago
    It's essentially a threaded HTML-box overlay for a certain part of text. I think that's how you would implement such a system, isn't it? Just because RG uses it for explanations doesn't mean that it can't be used for exposition/comments. In fact, I think that when RG blogged on their problems with Heroku, this is the style that they used.
    - jpwagner 14y ago
      if all you meant was text-overlay, then yes. in fact, lot's of sites do this.
phaker 14y ago
You shouldn't have to go to Reddit to get a decent directory of my blog. Anyway, you can't; anything that makes it onto Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us is mixed in with everything else, and gets bumped down into oblivion by stuff that's newer and/or better. Actually you can "unmix" it: http://www.reddit.com/domain/steve-yegge.blogspot.com/top/ http://www.reddit.com/domain/steve-yegge.blogspot.com/top/ I know this is a far cry from what he's asking for, but it's still damn useful.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
From the comments: > Keep an eye on ycombinator's infogami. The creator has strong ties to the reddit crew and is probably pretty well placed to realise your redditblogiki idea. RIP Aaron.
zokier 14y ago
I'm not sure about the emphasis on commenting features on a blog. It might be for the best if blogs did not support comments at all, at least in a ideal world. Instead replies would be composed in the commenters personal blog, and some kind of trackback link system would connect the blog-posts together.

66 points by platz 14y ago

"Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?" Voting on good or bad articles for a blog? This is a good idea. "For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments are ordered chronologically, just like the entries." Comments along the side, remarking on the story as it goes? This is a good idea. "And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes -- heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me, because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version" Diffs? This is a good idea. "All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds." This is a good extension of the previous idea. "When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern- matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?" ... uhm. Well 4 in a row aint bad.

scribu 14y ago
It's pretty sad that, 7 years later, all these good ideas still haven't been incorporated into any mainstream web publishing tool in a coherent way. The closest we have to inline comments is the Google Docs interface and StackOverflow uses and exposes revisions, but neither has a self-hosted version.
- psycr 14y ago
  As Steve identifies in his post, I think that the critically difficult part is applying versioning to multiple degrees of the content: the prima facie post itself, but also the inline comments, etc. In a sense, you'd have to have some kind of conflict resolution. Git could be an inspiration here. Should anyone be interested in experimenting/prototyping a system like this - I'm up for a weekend hack or so. My contact information is in my profile.
  - scribu 14y ago
    I just realized that Github's pull requests UI handles this pretty well: You can leave a comment on a particular line in the diff and the comment will be collapsed if you update the code and the diff gets outdated, but the UI will still show you the original chunk you commented on.
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  The suggested commenting system was sorta implemented by Microsoft a long time ago (IE5?). Internet Explorer had a plugin called "Discussions" or "Discuss" or something to that effect. It let you have comment threads on any webpage, without involving the actual site. I'm not sure if there was a public service, or it was more of an Intranet type thing. I do recall seeing the Discuss button in IE much later then IE5, and a quick search shows plenty of people asking what it is, so it mustn't have been too obscure a feature.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    Google had that too. Can't remember what it was called though.
    - bjxrn 14y ago
      Google Sidewiki?
      - dasil003 14y ago
        There you go.
andrewflnr 14y ago
Even on the last one, once I parsed the sentence, I thought that was a good idea, too :). Configuration should run on a sort of prototype basis, where it can be specialized at any point in whatever processing chain is at work... Excuse me, I need to rewrite some code.
kenferry 14y ago
OmniWeb has per-site CSS overrides and site prefs! It's actually quite nice. That's a feature I miss.
Tomis02 14y ago
"When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious?" Opera has per-site configuration options.
- lsh 14y ago
  Better yet, when you go to modify your per-site config (right click -> edit site preferences) you can add wildcards to the site ... for example, I could turn on cookies for *.ycombinator.com
mseebach 14y ago
It's a great idea. It's called "Google Wave".

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

martinced 14y ago

Regarding the fact that you can edit blogs after the fact, he writes: "...that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me" (btw I just love Steve Yegge. Guys like him and pg brought me to Emacs and Lisps: thanks.) I'm exactly on the same tune there: editing something after other people have already commented just feel dishonest. That's my biggest problem with SO: people can actually edit other's questions. For that reason alone things like Usenet / Google groups are much better: no revisionism can take place there. A system where you can clearly see the edits (and always see them) would be much better than all these "wiki-style" blogs and Q/A sites where people can actually modify what others meant. Wikis are great for stuff like Wikipedia: where people collaborate on a topic. But people don't "collaborate" on a SO question (on answers maybe, but on questions no way) just as people don't "collaborate" on a blog entry. Edits, when allowed, should be clearly visible. To me Yegge is spot on: there's a dishonesty issue at work here.

cocoflunchy 14y ago

Unrelated comment directed at @martinced who commented on this page: you have been hellbanned, all your comments from the past 3 days are marked as dead even though they are (as far as I can judge) relevant and thought out.

RobotCaleb 14y ago
Since the point of hellbanning is to not let the afflicted in on it, is it frowned upon to inform others of such status?
- kami8845 14y ago
  If people are actually contributing, letting them know that they have been hellbanned is good for the community.
- mcav 14y ago
  It's often a mystery why people get hellbanned.
- DanBC 14y ago
  It would be frowned upon if the hellbanned user was trolling or flaming.
dasil003 14y ago
I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the PyCon incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently woman-hating psychopaths during that whole debacle. I'm not saying that's the case here (I haven't looked), but it's an interesting question as to whether such individuals, having returned to a facade of sanity, should be allowed back into the discussion.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >I noticed an uptick in hellbanned after the PyCon incident. It seems several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently woman-hating psychopaths during that whole debacle. Alternatively, it could be that several otherwise rational individuals turned into violently politically correct, hell-banning for no much reason psychopaths during the whole debate.

kislayverma 14y ago

I haven't checked it out in detail, but Jeff Atwood's 'Discourse' (http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/) does seem to have some of this stuff. It's a forum, but I wonder if it could be used as a blog. And although I agree that the prevalent blogging software could use some lovin', but I hardly think it is as broken as the article seems to imply.

natural219 14y ago

This article isn't about blogging software. To me, it was about the challenges of starting any project. Whenever I have an idea, I find that implementing that idea produces a fractal of ideas for how to make that implementation easier -- I always want a blogging platform that "just does this bit automatically", or I want my development tools to behave exactly the way I want them to, which ends up hindering my actual doing of the damn thing.

hkon 14y ago

His points make me think of Google Wave. I find myself missing the wave all the time, and the competing products xxx don´t come close.

nagrom 14y ago

"For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments are ordered chronologically, just like the entries." Isn't this what Rap Genius does?

jpwagner 14y ago
I may misunderstand, but it seems that rap genius has a specific type of annotation (ie best explanation rather than comment-thread). I think the OP's suggestion is more similar to how soundcloud does comments.
- nagrom 14y ago
  It's essentially a threaded HTML-box overlay for a certain part of text. I think that's how you would implement such a system, isn't it? Just because RG uses it for explanations doesn't mean that it can't be used for exposition/comments. In fact, I think that when RG blogged on their problems with Heroku, this is the style that they used.
  - jpwagner 14y ago
    if all you meant was text-overlay, then yes. in fact, lot's of sites do this.

phaker 14y ago

You shouldn't have to go to Reddit to get a decent directory of my blog. Anyway, you can't; anything that makes it onto Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us is mixed in with everything else, and gets bumped down into oblivion by stuff that's newer and/or better. Actually you can "unmix" it: http://www.reddit.com/domain/steve-yegge.blogspot.com/top/ http://www.reddit.com/domain/steve-yegge.blogspot.com/top/ I know this is a far cry from what he's asking for, but it's still damn useful.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

From the comments: > Keep an eye on ycombinator's infogami. The creator has strong ties to the reddit crew and is probably pretty well placed to realise your redditblogiki idea. RIP Aaron.

zokier 14y ago

I'm not sure about the emphasis on commenting features on a blog. It might be for the best if blogs did not support comments at all, at least in a ideal world. Instead replies would be composed in the commenters personal blog, and some kind of trackback link system would connect the blog-posts together.