Adam DuVander on keeping it simple
Things I have learned from a long Thanksgiving weekend watching Twin Peaks and working on little side projects…
They may not be ranked correctly, but each of these is an important discovery that will help me for years to come.
Ooo! I found one in my title. That should be “typos.”
From time to time, I’ll read a site and find a misspelling or typo. If it’s convenient (email address nearby, or they’re a friend of mine), I usually let the author know. As this has happened over the last year, I’m reminded of an idea that Matt Haughey had to let a trusted group edit his posts for errors. This seems like a widget that someone could add into extensible frameworks like Moveable Type and WordPress. A non-exhaustive search shows that nobody has worked this up yet.
Matt later expanded his idea to include letting anyone make edits. This seems like the natural progression and where typo-removal might be easiest. To avoid misuse, there would be a certain threshold, so that folks couldn’t make changes willy-nilly, rewriting entire posts. And there would have to be a way to revert changes… this is sounding more and more like a Wiki.
Like any software project, I can certainly see feature creep taking over this little widget. Anytime you give up even a tiny piece of control, it will probably be used differently than you imagined. For each nasty thing someone cooks up, there’s a piece of duct tape to make sure it never happens again. But how long can that dance go on? As I’m thinking through problems and their solutions, it’s moved from a simple little widget to a more involved solution to what wasn’t even that big of a pain in the first place.
The issues that arise out of this typo corrector are the same ones facing the many Wiki programmers. In general, I believe in people to do good. And I believe in the simple solution. However, wiki-izing the entire web would probably not comfort most people.
I’d love to come to some sort of conclusion, but I’m not sure there is one yet. Any ideas? If not, I suppose you can keep emailing me those “ttypos.”
Adrian Holovaty just announced the Post Remix, which he is also calling Mashington Post (ie, mashup of Washington Post). The site is meant to encourage innovative uses of Post content.
A couple of my projects have been highlighted:
Everything mentioned in Adrian’s post looks pretty cool. I get the feeling this is only the tip of the iceberg.
I wrote about a couple of new services recently and quickly received comments from their creators. Wow. The Internet is sure making it easy to administer the PR from product launches. No doubt the people in charge of the services I mentioned in Year of the Password Manager and So Many Private Betas are subscribed to a service that tracks keywords.
So, I have put aside my modesty and signed up for a number of phrases at Technorati. As usual, Mike Duffy was months ahead of me.
In the summer of 2001, I wrote that addiction to coffee is emotional, not chemical. At the time I didn’t have much of a regular schedule, aside from the one the Giants gave me. Now I have a pretty set schedule, including a trip to a coffee shop to pick up my morning cup.
I find the experience of purchasing, holding, and walking with the coffee gives me the effect one expects from consuming the beverage. Sometimes I glance at my cup around noon, thinking I should refill it. Then I pick it up to find most of my previous drink still available, albeit cold.
So I down the chilled coffee and rush out to get some hot stuff. It’s not about drinking it, it’s about feeling it.