Blog Or Get Off The Pot

Great! But the link at your site is broken - http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/steve-yegge.blogspot.com

I'm writing a MUD in Ruby right now.

I started with Java - this is how I learned java. Man I hate writing accessors and mutators.

I tried in C# - this is how I learned C#. Man I hate the MSDN KB. Actually, I just blogged about it because doing so kept me from vomiting.

Now I'm going in Ruby. Oh man. There's no comparison. It really is 3x better in 1/3 of the time with 1/2 the code (or less).

I think a MUD project is a good way for me to learn better software engineering--threading, polymorphism, plug-ins and other things in the context of an event-driven system. Would you agree with this statement? Or, could you suggest another chewable project that is a good general exercise?

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.

Hmm, the inline-comments-idea is really good, but how to implement it? How do you specify the text to comment on? Per paragraph, per word, or per character? Comment on comments, or comment on words in comments too?

How to display them? Next to the text, in a balloon? Hide them by default?

Versioned post are good, but versioned comments? Doesn't this make the system too complicated?

If I have time, I'll try to create something like inline comments. Versioned posts/comments should be easy to do with acts_as_versioned.

So, three views: by tag, by date, and by rating.

i feel very similarly about there not being enough time, in general; there's just too much stuff out there!

you, for example, have a really interesting blog. i read some of your book recommendations (notably geb, a book i too intend on finishing one rainy day/week/year ;) and articles on dynamic languges, checked out your game, etc... while this may come off as being, um, dunno, condescending maybe, there are just *zillions* of great resources like this out there, all needing to be read! :/

(for example, i spent nearly a straight week once reading all of charles bloom's blogs, rants, coding logs... don't even get me started about wikipedia, tabbed browsing and grouped bookmarks...)

what's an eternally curious person to do these days? on the one hand, it's great that there's so much information accessible to everyone, but on the other, some people (such as myself) can feel very "stretched" and disoriented at times amidst the constant buzz of a million minds working and publishing at once...

one constantly has to choose between catching up or doing one's own thing, and as time goes on it's becoming increasingly difficult to take breaks if you want to stay current in any decently technical field. at least this is how it seems to be me now, relative to say 1995.

5 years to fully flesh out a single idea is about right, and any decent programmer should be having many decent ideas each and every day (involuntarily, need-a-notepad-in-the-shower moments). in my case this produces a constant feeling of guilt, that i should be doing a thousand things (besides the stuff i need to do irl) and that i'm constantly "missing things" and "out of the loop" :(

i hope i'm not the only one who suffers from this from time to time!

-thomas ([email protected])

For instance, I want inline comments.

Nobody else I know has a blog with posts as long as yours. If all your entries were less than 2k, inline comments would be less important.

Not that I'm complaining; I enjoy your long posts. I'm just pointing out why you have an itch that nobody's scratched yet.

Now go learn greasemonkey and do it.

In other words, the commentary on a blog entry should grow outward, not downward.

It's not exactly what you're talking about, but Fugi creates a 2D commentspace.

I just found a program called "Pligg" (a Web2.0 CMS, whatever that means). It doesn't have inline comments, but it does appear to have popularity scoring of articles.

Has anybody else come across people posting software releases as blog entries? It's CRAZY! You find yourslef linked to some blog announcing product V1.2.3 and you have to trawl through all their other crap to find out if it's the latest version or not.

Anyway funny coincidence I was reading through your drunken rants just yesterday Stevie and now here I am. Oh yeah also learning Ruby it rocks.

> Now go learn greasemonkey and do it.

That's really not a bad idea at all. I love GreaseMonkey, and write gm scripts all the time. I even spent some time while setting this blog up thinking about how I'd go about "deploying" a custom GreaseMonkey script just for my blog. I suppose I could host it over on my cabochon site, but it'd be nicer if Blogger offered some minimal file uploading support.

Anyway, thanks for reminding me. I'll ponder it.

> Hmm, the inline-comments-idea is really good, but how to implement it? How do you specify the text to comment on? Per paragraph, per word, or per character? Comment on comments, or comment on words in comments too?

I was thinking per-paragraph, although of course it's tricky, since the original poster could delete or insert paragraphs, including that one in particular. You need a reliable way to tie the comment thread back to the text that sparked it. So maybe I'd just save the paragraph and the approximate document location, and just have that original paragraph duplicated at the top of each inline comment thread. Then no blog-entry versioning is needed. Maybe the blog author could move the balloons around to new document locations if the blog undergoes any significant surgery after posting. Yeah. Don't try to hard to figure it out algorithmically; just let the blog author deal with making it all line up after edits.

> How to display them? Next to the text, in a balloon? Hide them by default?

I was thinking a slim gutter/margin, with a little balloon next to any paragraph that has a comment thread. Assume any comments on that paragraph are part of the same thread. Show/hide would be nice, but probably isn't critical.

> Versioned post are good, but versioned comments? Doesn't this make the system too complicated?

Yes, don't worry about versioned comments. :)

> If I have time, I'll try to create something like inline comments. Versioned posts/comments should be easy to do with acts_as_versioned.

Sounds like a Rails person talking here.

> So, three views: by tag, by date, and by rating.

That would be exceptionally, *exceptionally* cool. Especially if it were documented. :)

I read some of your drunken blogging posts. They're interesting. This won't change how you feel, but seeing as I feel the need to air this out and your provision for nameless guys like me the opportunity to post comments, I'll take it.

In regards to the interview chronicles regarding how someone was aweful or saved themselves during job interviews, I'd have to say you're a bit of snob aren't you? Granted the people you plan to hire will be paid substantial amounts of money to do good solid work, I think you're the kind of interviewer who tends to mold the people who work under him into little clones of him. "You must know this for me to consider you a 'true engineer' otherwise, I will boot you out the door." I think it's narrow minded and it's a wonder why more people don't go into the technical fields with the people who are currently populating it. Egoists and snobs even if it is deserved.

Hello,

Thanks for writing this, I found it quite interesting. However I don't agree completely, for example you wrote that you can learn a lot w/o doing exercises. For me I think i only understand if I solved a problem myself (that means after reading theory and studying example do some exercises)

You also wrote that it's good to spend some time on surfing on wikipedia, so I will try this now. Let's see what I learn..

I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules

Opera Technology Preview 2 has a feature called "Site preferences" which lets you change most settings based on url patterns.

Your idea for blogging software is exactly the sort of thing that I'm looking for right now. And I looked at Typo, as well, but encountered the same problem--no one has really put out a good set of documentation, so trying to modify it is an exercise in trial-and-error.

The question is, if you don't write this software, who will? Is Typo the answer, if someone will just write some documentation?

> 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.

Closest I've seen so far to this (in Firefox) is the tweaking of permissions on a per-site basis. From http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs:


// Use configurable security policies to override popups, see
//http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html

// Turn window.open off for particular sites:

user_pref(
"capability.policy.popupsites.sites", "http://www.annoyingsite1.com http://www.popupsite2.com");

user_pref(
"capability.policy.popupsites.Window.open",
"noAccess");

Take a look at Peter Norvig's site:

http://norvig.com/

He has his content arranged by popularity and topic (with RSS for chronological stuff and a google search box, too).

Is the game code available, or have you considered making it available, to provide an example (or warning) for folks who would like to spend 5-7+ years working on something similar?

Omniweb for the Mac lets you override settings for any page you visit.

I can't find any RSS link to your blog, so I took the liberty of entering your site at FeedBurner.

For anyone who's interested, an RSS feed of this blog is available at:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveysBlogRants


(Steve, if you want me to delete it, please contact me at [email protected])

You can get pretty much everything you asked for in a blog except inline comments through Drupal and judicious choice of plugins. Check out my blog for an example of some of it.

Me and my friends have inline comments working fine at our blog, which is wiki-based.

People insert comments by either adding (: comment text --[[Name]]) directly into sentences, or lines starting with colons like

: comment text --[[Name]]
:: reply to comment --[[Other Name]]

between paragraphs or after the text.

Comments are hidden while viewing the blogs' front pages with multiple entries; they become visible while looking at the individual articles.

Being a wiki there are naturally not so many redundant comments -- and long off-topic-threads can move to separate pages like any wiki.

Commentary allows retrofitting inline commenting.

http://pythonpaste.org/commentary/

Shortly, scriptable Hobix by Why not mentioned. I haven't used it.

I just found a working example of inline comments:

http://fhtr.org/kig/dev/selection_test3.html

The only downside is that it's written in java script.

I recently subscribed to your feed, Steve, (after attending the Google Developer Day and reading some of the related articles) so I'm catching up on some of your older posts. Just in case you or someone else is still curious about the points you raised, I have a few suggestions:

Blogs are "diary" format because they are personal - everyone has down days or thoughts that don't appeal to everyone, and it is that human quality that makes blogs appealing. I like the blog format precisely because it cuts through the popularity competition that is Digg et al, and allows me to explore the posting personality of people that interest me. In particular, I have enough opportunty for influence by the unwashed masses in the many push technologies available. Reading chronological posts in blogs is a very welcome alternative.

Inline comments are a nightmare feature from a readability viewpoint. Besides, it's already solved in a much cleaner fashion with technology I like to call "quote if necessary". On the other hand, threaded comments are a great idea - for example, I hate how the author's comments are included inline with everyone elses, when they are often just replying to another comment.

Versioning? Maybe, but it's relatively rare, and edits can be tagged as edits manually, which is a standard, functional option.

Anyway, my real addition to your rant is a solution for your call for what amounts to a markup system for blog entries. You've probably heard of this by now, but I was also stunted by the same gross inadequecy, particularly when posting code snippets. After some investigation, I came across Markdown, which is simply invaluable in my blogging. It essentially allows you to use wiki-like syntax for your posts, which are rendered correctly when you submit. As a bonus, the markup is designed to look very good as plain text too, which allows great versatility.

Finally, I just want to concur with Thomas Ludwig, who in his comment says that the amount of content worth pursuing is very poorly compensated by the time available to actually pursue to. I feel it, brother, well said.

PPS. I don't know whether my Google account will reference my blog, and naturally I do want to share, so here's my ego link: Killing Mind