Website Redesign
Sean B. Palmer
rather than inamidst.com. I'd also like to use W3C date style instead
of the random scheme that I have at the moment.
So for example, my unpublished jQuery version of one of Dickinson's
poems about autumn would be at:
http://infomesh.net/2008/autumn
Though subfolders would also be permitted, so for example my articles
on Citruses from What Planet is This? and The Cumbric Vocabulary from
Lo and Behold! would be at:
http://infomesh.net/2005/planet/citruses
http://infomesh.net/2007/lo/cumbric
Respectively. I'd keep everything where it is, but anything "filled
in" on infomesh.net would be cast anew. In other words, I wouldn't
remove the What Planet pages from inamidst.com.
I'm not entirely sure about the subfolders. It might be better to use
just 2005/citruses, and then have a manifest file for making it easy
to see what's in What Planet. But when it comes to something like
archiving the Gallimaufry of Whits, I'm not sure what style to use.
Subfolders would be needed for versions of phenny and so forth anyway.
I'm not sure what to do about all my Semantic Web stuff, whether I
want to put that on infomesh.net or not. There's so much of it!
Perhaps I'll just put some of the better stuff on there.
The idea is to go through all of this old stuff and republish it
according to the principles vaguely outlined in this article:
http://inamidst.com/stuff/2010/organise
And to use some of my latest styles, such as my MediaWiki themed stylesheet.
I know, by the way, that this article says to abandon date based
hierarchies. But that was based on the idea of having only a slim
selection of the very best things online, whereas I think now that
breadth is important. And in a breadthy system, you pretty much have
to use W3C date style organisation.
Perhaps I should write an update to the Organisation article. One of
the main things worth saying more about is that much of this comes
down to an attitude of looking at your old articles.
Sometimes I think about scripts like this now too. That it's better to
give a brief description of what the script would do than to write the
script itself, if it's not something that's going to be used very
much.
When you look back at old articles, it's easy to see what dates and
what doesn't. Then you have to start trying to use that mindset when
you write new articles, though you shouldn't let that put you off of
experimentation and the like.
On the domain name choice, infomesh.net is just better than
inamidst.com. Nobody can remember "inamidst", but "infomesh" is more
regular. The top level domain choice is a bit stickier, but I think
that net goes with mesh nicely.
Morbus Iff
Whatever happened to the idea of putting it in MediaWiki itself?
--
Morbus Iff ( if god is in me, he is a tumor )
http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.disobey.com/wiki/
twitter: @morbusiff / skype: morbusiff / irc.freenode.net, Morbus
An O'Reilly author and blogger: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Sean B. Palmer
> Whatever happened to the idea of putting it in MediaWiki itself?
I did try using a MediaWiki instance, called The Globspace, for new
articles. There are a few reasons why I don't want to and can't use
one for infomesh.net:
* In the archival sense, it's going to be very difficult to convert a
lot of webpages to work with MediaWiki. For example, the first page
that I mentioned in the original email, the Dickinson Autumn thing, is
interactive and uses jQuery. Though it would probably still be
possible to convert all old HTML pages in this way, it's a lot of
effort for no value.
* Sometimes I want to post things which are completely alien to the
MediaWiki organisation, such as phenny source with associated .hg and
.git files. That is literally impossible on MediaWiki.
* The MediaWiki apparatus is quite large and complex when all I really
want to do is serve up a few static files. MediaWiki fits library
style collections, which fits very well for your projects for example,
and I thought would fit mine okay too, but when I tried it out I
realised that I'm very scrappy, which doesn't fit the carefully
maintained collection style of MediaWiki.
On the positive side, though, The Globspace did make me realise that
having a single unified style for a site is a really good thing and
makes you concentrate on content. To transfer this benefit, I made a
stylesheet which mimics MediaWiki as much as possible, and am
generally using that for new pages.
I'm also leaving the door open, of course, to MediaWiki in the future.
I think what I'd really like is a small community wiki, a Swhack Wiki
perhaps, where people can write all sorts of stuff and we can grow it
together. But I'm not sure that we have enough contributors and things
to contribute to make that worthwhile!
--
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/
Morbus Iff
> lot of webpages to work with MediaWiki. For example, the first page
> that I mentioned in the original email, the Dickinson Autumn thing, is
> interactive and uses jQuery. Though it would probably still be
> possible to convert all old HTML pages in this way, it's a lot of
> effort for no value.
http://www.disobey.com/node/1882 ;)
> * The MediaWiki apparatus is quite large and complex when all I really
> want to do is serve up a few static files. MediaWiki fits library
> style collections, which fits very well for your projects for example,
> and I thought would fit mine okay too, but when I tried it out I
> realised that I'm very scrappy, which doesn't fit the carefully
> maintained collection style of MediaWiki.
Not entirely sure I agree with that.
> I'm also leaving the door open, of course, to MediaWiki in the future.
> I think what I'd really like is a small community wiki, a Swhack Wiki
> perhaps, where people can write all sorts of stuff and we can grow it
> together. But I'm not sure that we have enough contributors and things
> to contribute to make that worthwhile!
As far as I recall, you already tried that and it failed, da?
--
Morbus Iff ( masochism-oriented recombinant bot (unlisted series) )
Sean B. Palmer
> http://www.disobey.com/node/1882 ;)
Yeah, just using jQuery as an example of how many of my pages are
"complex" in some way. Having said that, one of the biggest
complexities of course is all the CGI scripts, and I think I'm going
to make it so that I don't use any CGIs, except maybe for the
homepage.
So that might eliminate this point, but I'd need to take a closer look
at what other peculiarities my pages have.
> As far as I recall, you already tried that and it failed, da?
Yeah, we had a Swhack Wiki, but it was a jottit thing rather than a
MediaWiki thing. Still, I'm not sure that changing the engine would up
participation by the 10000% or so required to make it worth doing.
Sean B. Palmer
> Morbus Iff ( masochism-oriented recombinant bot (unlisted series) )
Also, I didn't know that Morbus existed in email form on the weekends,
even if briefly. Shame that Blizz don't do a Warcraft play by post
system. Though I imagine it would go something like this:
* * *
From: Blizzard Play By Post <bliz...@pbp.battle.net>
Subject: Re: ICC-10
On Sun, Dec 5, 2010 at 12:45 PM Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> Cast [Holy Shock] on The Lich King.
Ghostcrawler writes:
"Your shot would have been successful in bringing The Lich King down,
were it not for the fact that I reduced the efficacy of Blessing of
Kings by 35% just a few minutes prior to your post. Instead, The Lich
King beats the absolute hell out of you, and steals your gear. You go
back to regular Northrend heroics, but find that other players spit at
you because you can't even keep the most epic tanks alive."
--
Coming soon to Blizzard Entertainment:
Don't miss Frataclysm™, the dragon game for jocks!