mgualt

Given the topic of the post, OP should also watch Brazil.

There seem to be comments on gists already -- I am trying to figure out how they are dealt with in github.

Very interesting - I also noticed that gists have comments -- I'm not sure how those are handled. Doesn't this mean that gists are the ultimate blog? Can you even create them locally and push?

What is a gist, really? Is it a versioned, modifiable and referencable publication? Can I store it in my github repo? Should we be using gist as a model for info packet? is there an "API"? If someone could explain their understanding of a gist, I would appreciate it.

Thanks for the reply:

I don't know about HTML5, so I will look into that. But my concern is more about how to design the system. Let me explain.

LaTeX is quite a formidable system nowadays, with a well-developed markup language optimized for mathematics and technical writing, as well as a compiler which does advanced typesetting (for PDF output, that is). Because of the way the system is organized, there are thousands of packages available for LaTeX which essentially extend the markup language and provide new functionality to the compiler to produce diagrams, for example, or certain alternate PDF formats, etc. The amount of work done in the LaTeX domain in terms of development is quite amazing.

In view of this, is there a way of extending LaTeX in such a way that all this functionality ports over to the creation of more active documents/webpages?

Padgett's drawings, viewable from the link below, are not fractals. The fact that they resemble mathematical diagrams in Euclidean geometry does not make them fractals. I would be curious to find out who first christened his work 'fractal', as I think it does him a disservice.

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/jason-padgett.html?tab=ar...

The fact that you don't allow comments because of "dogshit" and "spam" means that your comments system is broken. That's like saying "I don't do email because of dogshit and spam". Spam is manageable in email, so the fact that it's out of control in comments means that noone has thought through a proper comments system.

When you say "Say it somewhere that you control, and link it. That's how the web works." I understand where you're coming from, but this is simply not true. Wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. The web is not made of a collection of interlinked static HTML files. But the root of your complaint, that by commenting on someone's blog you give away your worthwhile thoughts, is also a failure of the bad comment system.

Comments should work a lot more like email does. Imagine if each blog entry had an email address (or sub-address of the blog's email address) and sending a "comment" was really sending an email to that address. The comment box below the blog entry is really a small email composing window which sends the comment to the blog. And it can also send it to your own email address (as a cc for the purposes of the thought experiment). Then it would be in your email archive and not lost, but you would still be contributing to the discussion happening at the blog. A further benefit of this is that the spam filter for the email address would function for comments on a blog. Why reinvent the wheel? /end example.

I have come to this issue from the experience of working with bloggers with quite long-running substantial blogs on Wordpress or Blogger. They have a huge laundry list of complaints and annoyances with the software but I cannot in good faith recommend a jekyll-octopress solution or a wikified solution, or a "static--html" solution etc. These "solutions" are poorly thought out and would represent a severe reduction in functionality for the sake of "that's how it should be done". It is the result of developers who look at a hard problem (how to best implement all these required features) and decide to get rid of the problem by disparaging the features or the requesters themselves.

I claim that comments are integral to the activity of blogging. In fact, most bloggers are chomping at the bit to get more comments, often they will do anything to get more comments, and not necessarily because there's a financial incentive.

If you look at the best blogs, I mean top blogs in their niche such as

http://www.thesartorialist.com/

http://girishshambu.blogspot.com/

http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/

you will see that they are comment heavy. In fact there are very interesting discussions in the comments.

You may think comments are "unimportant" for most blogs, but that is not up to you, it is up to the blogger, and I guarantee that blogger would rather have some comments. And it might help to have a half-decent comment system.

There are many stackexchange clones. OSQA, shapado, coordino, and several others. The only one that can actually be installed without an infinite regress of dependencies which are no longer available (typical crappy developers who don't care about installation of their own software) is

http://www.question2answer.org/

re: comments, I strongly disagree that they are handled "superbly". For many important blogs, the comments are central to the whole endeavour. Why on earth would you cede control of your comments to disqus? Why do you keep your content and your comments separate? Will disqus be around in 2112? This is what I mean when I say that a "static blog system" is not a blog system at all. It is a partially thought-out solution which doesn't have the required functionality.

What is a blogging "platform"? For that matter, what exactly does "blogging" consist of? Many answers below don't provide what I would call a platform - many aspects of what one might call "bloggin" have not been thought through (e.g. archiving and exporting of entries and comments, how are comments integrated, security features, hosting...) These are all part of the design of a platform. Whatever you think of it, Wordpress is certainly a platform. Many of the answers (e.g. jekyll, rolling your own...) are not.

It would be good to actually define "blogging" and "blogging platform", which I think would be somewhat difficult to do.

The developer should explain the concept behind the document/view. Is there a fixed document and then a view path/graph? I would be interested to know what the conceptual model is.

Is there a high-level markup language that I can use to output to this? E.g. LaTeX style document structure but for this kind of presentation output?

Many of the comments focus on increasing the friendliness of emacs for new users, and how open-minded the maintainers are to this effort, though they realize in their wisdom that this is not necessarily a valuable goal in and of itself.

The newbie issue is a typical red herring and excuse for the maintainers not to face the fact that emacs has huge design problems for all users, not just newbies. For example, the presence of dozens of redundant crappy packages associated to every function, included by default in the distribution (e.g. a dozen word-wrapping packages) means that one is likely to use a substandard tool and have problems. The fact that all add-ons are treated with equal weight means that the command you are looking for is hidden among thousands of commands, most of which are way outside the scope of what I need. The proliferation of buffers, leading to the proliferation of buffer packages used to search through lists of buffers? You have to be kidding me. The customization system in Emacs is not only a throwback to 1980s UI "design" but completely out of control -- all options, no matter how minute, are treated on equal footing even if most of them should be hidden or in subtrees. Not only this, but the customization options themselves are badly named, using quirky terminology which nobody uses except emacs.

In short, emacs is thoroughly polluted and needs an environmental assessment and large-scale cleaning project. This has nothing to do with newbies, it has to do with oldies whose dusty, dried-up packages need to be swept into the dustbin of history.

I agree but there is no reason the text box couldn't achieve the same result -- sending an email. External client would nit be necessary. I have wondered why comments and google plus don't already work this way.

What about Still providing a simple text box, but the action upon submit is sending an email. It needn't be from the commenter's email address, it could be from a separate email address "comments" or perhaps a separate adress for the individual post.

Can we use this as a comments system? For example, a blog would have an email address and leaving a comment would basically send an email to the address, and then it would be displayed as a comment beneath the blog entry. The benefit would be that we can use email spam filtering on the comments. The email could be sent either from the user's email address or you could send it from the application's email address to itself.

Hear, hear! This post provides a perfect example of the utter failure of software engineering in the real world. I am reminded of it every time I try to install software, with all the ridiculous dependencies and multiple versions. Instead of addressing the serious foundational issues facing software development and architecture, the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language, creating even more problems.

Computer science and engineering departments should use these situations to train their students.

How can it be justifiable that one has to regenerate the entire blog every time a post is made? Do you have any idea how much time this wastes? Conceptually, I see no justification for this.

What they got out of it was a) gaining a greater knowledge about the way our world functions, b) training a new generation of scientists at a level of advanced research which goes beyond what was previously achieved. c) developed an advanced engineering industry which has broken new ground in materials science, not only in superconductivity and cooling, but in practically all engineering disciplines. d) developed a new level of sophistication in computer analysis and processing ability.

Many universities and advanced research facilities around the world contribute to a project as large as LHC, so the benefits are spread worldwide. However the location of LHC makes a huge impact on the scientific abilities and human resources of Europe.

As for how much benefit the average European derives from LHC, the question is really how much they benefit from the advancement of general scientific ability and human resources. Besides the innumerable everyday fruits of the advancement of science which average people enjoy today as compared with, say, 1803, there is the even more important fact that their future ability to establish a high quality of life, and to solve major problems, depends on their having an incredible skill and wisdom in dealing with the actual, factual world.

These periodically recurring organization threads always motivate me to take another stab at adopting some kind of coherent approach to organizing my ideas.

Then I get depressed at how poorly thought out almost all the options are. I then become convinced that the only system that has been fairly well thought out is org-mode.

Then I fire up my emacs and the incredible frustrations and overwhelming disgust start to rise like a slow flood.

I load up my .org file and it's not wrapped. I can't read it. So I try to change the options. There are 5 incomprehensible word wrap options and none of them work. Then when I re-load my .org file, it hasn't saved the word wrapping setting.

I can't remember if it's shift-tab, alt-tab, command-shift.... one of them puts a TODO, another puts a new star, now suddenly I've reordered half of my lists...

Meanwhile, once I move a paragraph, emacs displays some kind of fragments of the characters in the previous location... what the hell is this?

I decide that I'd like to collaborate on a project -- org-mode seems like a great tool. But wait, I forgot that my collaborator is actually a NORMAL person. What is the chance that they will read the org-mode manual? Oh that's right, I'll just send them to the IRC channel.

Where was the calendar again?

I am literally in tears now. tears. This is the best personal organization software we have. It's 2011. Orgmode looks like my father's 1985 IBM terminal. Why do we always have to wait for Apple to inject a miniscule amount of actual DESIGN into software?

Please help me...