Buzzz
Snapped this photo in High Park the other day.
"Yo, that looks good, move over so i can have some..."
Proposal
Tags and Transclusion for Tumblelog, a WIP proposal.
The start of a discussion about new features for tumblelog. This may be a bit ramblely, sorry!
Tags
Right now "posts" in tumblelog are separated by DATES, and all the items posted within a date are, sort of, considered a single post. Items inside a single day can be separated by using the % character.
My suggestion is to extend the % separator, so it can include more meta-data about each item, and promote this separator to define individual "posts". For example:
% <date> <title> <tags>
"% 2020-10-19 This new meta-data idea is dope! #blog-tech #idea #so-good"
All <date>, <title> and <tags> are optional, allowing the format to be very similar to the existing one. A change would be that every % item "inherits" the previously used date from %.
Tag collection pages would be created in the same general way that the archive is created.
Rendering of "dates" at the top of a group of similarly dated posts, like how the current parser works, would require a bit more logic and state.
Transclusion
Transcluding is more complicated, and i don't have a clear understanding myself about what the common use case for this would be, other than my own desire for how it would work. This Markdown-Content-Blocks proposal is interesting, although in this case it isn't the markdown compiler that would be dealing with the transclusion but the blog-engine itself.
My usecase is that i have pages setup for a bunch of different projects, and i want to tags posts with a project name, and then have those posts included in the project pages. Which is another reason for more fine-grained "post" definition.
Next steps
Is this even something that could be ported into the existing system? it would be a breaking change to the blog format, which is no small deal. A "half" step could be adding just the tags and titles to the %, maybe? I guess some feedback on this idea is the first step.
Congrats to John, creator of Tumblelog, for getting on the front page of hacker news! This has inspired me to write a feature proposal. :)
Adding personal site search via Search My Site, accessible via the search link at the top of the page. I like the reasons behind the building of this engine, details in the about page, and the "What went wrong with the internet (and how can it be fixed)?" article by the author and developer.
High level, another move to make the small web available to people again. Me blogging is an attempt to have a voice on the web which isn't filtered or owned by twitter or facebook.
Iron
Reading a 4 part series about iron, "Iron, How Did They Make It?', in the pre-modern age. Very interesting, especially in thinking about the differences between the reality of making iron and steel, and how it is frequently depicted in video games around crafting and resource management. Notably that iron is actually very prevalent and not difficult to find "in the wild", and the conversion/smelting of it didn't actually use coal, but a lot of charcoal. Anyway, the writing style is very approachable and, dare i say it, fun to read. History, it can be interesting! Lots of other articles that i'm looking forward to reading there too. Oh, and there is a lovely collection of articles setup/indexed for World Builders.