as a t-shirt
This is a reply to Dave’s call to action.
You know you have all these loose ends in life, like threads you mean to clip someday or sew up or rip out or fix or even just buy a new salmon colored shirt? That’s the state of writing on the web.
We’ve got who’s it’s and what’s it’s galore
but what we need is to get back to the basics of writing. Like a tagless t-shirt – how many years had I had to suffer the slings and arrows of tags! (no pun intended – but now it is).
Part of the problem with the new shirt option is it’s manufactured by people who make money advertising.
So we never break the chain. Even do-gooders sell out when faced with millions of dollars in their bank account. I mean why sell Twitter? Because everyone who could make the decision to sell Twitter became an overnight multi-millionaire and can do whatever they want next. I mean it’s just text – anyone could peddle that like sugar water.
This blog was started as a test of Dave’s Wordland editor which is a dead simple way to type in some text and publish it to your WordPress.com site. In fact I think I got the site on a Black Friday deal for something like $3/mo which is a few bucks less than I’d been paying for an Amazon Lightsail account where I had to care and feed the Linux – which I get my fill of by day job. Wordland’s in its infancy but Dave’s been good about soliciting feedback and updating.
I think the intent, and I hope it is, is to allow markdown too. Markdown (files ending in .md) should be taught in schools along side cursive and if cursive goes – leave md (if only I were in charge of education). It’s kind of a simple way to add the elements of writing to your document – taking it up a notch from a notepad type editor to one which allows you to write whole books less the whole html learning curve. Editors with markdown preview let you see your mistakes as you make them which is how we learn. In these books the contents and glossary and whosits and whatnots are auto-generated so you don’t have to worry about the mechanics of chapter numbers yada-yada-yada. The book is portable after that – think Kindle, pdf, html etc.
P.S. Another thread, which seems to me like a good one, is to shorten the path from typing to a certifiable web post suitable for your web on-ramp. The ones that fall in the category of what I’m thinking are referred to sometimes as static rendering, meaning they take all the contrasting dynamic stuff the computer has to do to produce a page and boil it off and bake a page into just pre-rendered text. A web server doesn’t have to hit databases or do any thinking after that – it just serves up the file (in our case .md) into html. The advantages are numerous.
The test case here for something I’ve tried – well there are many, one is GitHub pages. But that’s all fancy and stuff we don’t want that – but YMMV (but Microsoft owns it so now you don’t want it either do you – but I’ve got code running out there I made a decade ago in ClojureScript heh, try that with your favorite language). But the one I was thinking of is Borkdude’s quickblog. In case you don’t know who Borkdude is, he’s the man, a big contributor to Clojure (and his little scripting offshoot Babashka) my favorite language.
My instance was also on Lightsail but I’ve turned off that for now at least. But anyhow the idea was you grab his quickblog code and modify sort of a child site of it which integrates making upgrades doable. At the end of the day you write a .md file (with a little metadata info like title) and publish it and it’s on the web. This post got me interested initially.
Hopefully all these threads will congeal into an open source t-shirt fit for a king – I mean republic.
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