[pmwiki-users] Kind-of Blog 1.1 released

[Waylan Limberg]

On 12/14/05, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 02:18:52PM -0500, Ryan R. Varick wrote:
> >
> > The question is how to do it?  Do I append another number onto the
> > entry (20051214 becomes 2005121400, 2005121401, ...)?  Saving pages by
> > date already reduces the effectiveness of wiki links anyway, since
> > authors have to reference pages in a cryptic date format, I fear this
> > will make it that much worse.
>
> Reading many of Eliyahu Goldratt's books [1] has taught me that
> whenever there's an apparent conflict or contradiction, focus on the
> part that bothers you most.  In this case I think we ought to eliminate
> the restriction of having blog entries be named by dates.  (This
> doesn't mean they cannot be so named, just that we don't require it.)
>
> Okay, now for a naive question, since I'm not an active blogger --
> what's the reason behind having the blog entries named by date in
> the first place?  Perhaps we can find another way to solve that
> problem that doesn't require saving by date.
>
I've used a number of different blogging systems and generally they
all default to URLs by date. However, I have always changed that
behavior to use entry number and title (or at least one of the two). I
suppose the reasoning was that a blog is an online journal and
journals have conventionally contained entries by date. However, for a
first time visitor of a 5 year running blog, browsing old entries by
date has NO value. For this reason, some have more recently argued
(sorry I didn't bookmark those links) that (except for some special
cases) the blog should move away from such behavior (to the extent of
even removing all date based navigation) and use URLs that indicate
what the entry contains (such as the title or via categories). What if
2 entries share the same title? I suppose that is why the entry number
has often been included.

In addition, these systems have offered an optional "slug" field. If
left blank, it would default to 'The_entries_title' or perhaps
'TheEntriesTitle' and that would be used for the URL to the entry.
However, if the author felt the need to make some adjustments to the
default, s/he could do so by entering the slug verbosely in the slug
field. In my mind a 'slug' would translate into a pagename in PmWiki.
So if I wrote a blog entry entitled "My First Post", the page would be
named "Blog.MyFirstPost" or perhaps with entry numbers
"Blog.MyFirstPost-01" (not sure how PmWiki would determine the
number). At the same time, there needs to be a way to create a list of
the most recent entries for the home page, rss feeds etc. That does
not mean the most recently edited pages either. Just the most recently
created pages. I'm not aware if PmWiki currently has a mechanism in
place to do that.

Actually the way I see it, all one needs is to be able to create such
a list and as long as there is one entry per page, all the basics for
a single user blog are already available, at least via recipes
(comments, feeds, categories etc). The problem then is what to do
about old archives. The lists on Blog.Categories and Blog.Archives
would be pretty long on that 5 year running blog. Another one of those
cases where I wish PmWiki could do something like Blog.Categories.Cat1
etc. Sure there is always Blog.Categories-Cat1, but the resulting URL
of the former just looks better IMO.

Anyway, thats the thoughts that have been running through my head as
I've read through this discussion. Personaly, I think an actual
blogging system with a DB makes more sense for a blog, but at the same
time I don't see any reason why PmWiki wouldn't work.


--
----
Waylan Limberg
waylan at gmail.com