Filed under: chain-gang
Well, the skins work seamlessly now; I like this one well enough, but miss the multiple sidebars that a more flexible system offers… the Word-style fontification in Manila has occasional snags (e.g., not being preserved across rare operations), the forms used for posting sometimes forget their content if there’s an error in transmission, I still can’t use an embedded outliner to draft posts…
There are so many beautiful tools for expression out there! We’ve been exercising Manila (c/o blhe) and Movable Type (c/o f|net), and investigate flexible variants like Blosxom for customizing the blogs underlying data structures [ interlocking indices, layered superstructures(metadata) and substructures (chunking) ]. The latter two allow multiple categorizations, and automatically generate by-category views… a big plus in my book.
Then there are other tools for coordinating shared notes. An email-to-web ice like Neotonic’s Archive, or, more fundamentally, a db-to-web ice allowing many coordinators to create different views for users to see, letting a solid db handle auditing and permissions.Stay tuned.
Update: we have an Archive instance working, and are planning an NNTP-based mail/web/news gateway for separating preferred input channels from preferred browsing channels…