Template Authoring

In this larger box, I type in my blog post, which will be published with the colours and layout I selected from a collection of templates

I was toying around with some geocities templates again today, trying to decide which could be tweaked into something useful. I find that most such templates are either for written pages or lists. What if I want something in between? I think it may be sensible to list a few kinds of pages: The overview or menu or table of contents page; the "story" page; the "newspaper front" page -- contents with tempting paragraphs; the file record page, like an address lookup; the photo album page (probably a sub-type of the previous kind); the "tool" -- forms feeding into a database.

Incredibly narrow! The templates can hardly be used at all outside of the narrow pages they are designed for, as there ar many strange panes with limited numbers of characters, and most headlines can't be edited. The menu pages are the most versatile, but they are also very limited in how long the descriptions can be.
Many of them look nice, but they are oh, so slow to use, as all images you want to insert must come from your iDisk.

Some restrictions are genre traits, not technological prescripts. There are many things I can't do in Blogger, or that are difficult to do. But there are also many things that one could do on the Web that would be totally outside of the Blog genre. It is too simple to criticise Blogger for making it difficult to leave the genre it was meant to serve

Here's how I think (naively?) engineers work: 1. pose a problem; 2: hypothesise a solution; 3: test the solution; 4: evaluate the results.
I will need to pose the problem and evaluate the results precisely.

In the Hypothetic-deductive method, you can only prove something false. In algorithms, much of algebra, and in engineering, it seems to me you can only prove that things work. You cannot know if something is impossible, you can only demonstrate what is possible.

It is time to get theoretical. Now I need to think about the analytic-syntetic method. Read paper.

Isn't really an advantage to me. It is some small new features, but the interface is slow. Way too slow. The link tool, however, is excellent. It was a breeze to link to, say, Mark's blog.

Two features of the blog are now implemented: hypertext (that is, children) and unique stylesheets. It took a whole day plus a little this morning. I am very pleased with the outcome.
Whatever Mark says, Tinderbox does strange things with relative linking. Images invariably get a preceding "/", and relative links from pages with ^include are wrong.
Left to fix: overall look, tempting intros on front page, bookmarks, blogroll, random old post.

Spent all of Monday and a few hours of today on rebuilding the blog I deleted. Still not quite finished.

Then I took my paper to Dayan's half-baked seminar. He has a way of telling anyone that their project is big, important and with deep theoretical impact. It was nice. Books to read: Eco's Open Work, Kristevas Verisimilar.

Daniel said that PowerPoint is like power dressing: it is a costume you put on to look impressive.

What he meant was to say that templates are a way of performing yourself. You choose the template to look like who you wish to be to others. I think he is right on the spot.

Most templates, like Blogger's do not prescribe much of your writing, it just dresses is up in visual codes, that but a second meaning on your message; the meaning of your self -- your power suit.

Daniel Dayan suggested a great term for the limits of templates: prescriptions or prescripts. Something written in advance, with the double meaning of something that is good for you.

Found the bug in Tinderbox, and a workaround. It seems that a don'tExport item blocks all other items further down the Outline view. When I moved the item to the bottom of the Outline, it worked. Big step forward.
I can't decide what's best, to have the previous and next buttons on top or bottom.

BLOGGER
Ah. The blogthis button. One-click linking with annotation. A revolution in my mind. Come on, Mark, we need this for Tinderbox!

The bigger box, the longer average post. Jill noted this long ago. Blogger new has a way bigger box than the lofi version. Nielsen has noted this for search boxes, by the way.