Why do I have a newsletter? Why does the medium of content delivery even exist? What is it about an email that one can't get from RSS? Is the problem RSS readers? Not wanting to own/install/use a new application? Time to think.#
I like write.as as a platform. It is very clean. But it unnecessarily complicates every aspect of blogging by making it its own service. Drafts is a service. Snaps is a service. Reader is a service. Soon replies would also be a service. I don't get the point behind that. Saving grace is all are add-ons once you purchase the pro plan. Not that I am going to.#
- I always find it fascinating to look at the way different blogging systems handle tags. For most, it is a particular field, a metadata around a post. That is so mundane, plain. It's high time we stopped thinking of tags as that. #
- Why do we need tags? We need them so that we can group together posts that talk about an idea. When you ask it as a field while publishing, I have already written about the post. Let me decide what the post is about when I am writing them.#
A natural way we have accepted to that is through the way of #hashtags on Twitter. Include some identifier and let your blogging engine convert the linked word to a tag. I love this. It is natural to highlight a word while you are writing it. For example, I like to include tags for my #meta posts like this where I am talking about tools around blogging.#- But doing so is costly for blogging engines and many prefer not to do it. You have to process it post publishing and pull out the tags and update the backend. Write.as does it well. I wish more systems did it.#
- How does this help the readers though? Sure, hashtags as part of body makes it easy for the author. But for a reader, displaying the tags as part of the body can be distracting if redirected to regular list interfaces. But I don't think there is a simpler solution. Another way is how Dave Winer did it on Scripting News (looks to be broken now) where he opens a dialog in which you can swipe through the posts. A nice interface to be frank.
I would love to see other such design patterns for displaying grouped posts. # - What would I want? Add tags as hashtags, elements in the body used for grouping post publishing. When a tag is clicked on, don't redirect to a list - rather display the list along with post in some manner. #
Why do I have a newsletter? Why does the medium of content delivery even exist? What is it about an email that one can't get from RSS? Is the problem RSS readers? Not wanting to own/install/use a new application? Time to think.#
I like write.as as a platform. It is very clean. But it unnecessarily complicates every aspect of blogging by making it its own service. Drafts is a service. Snaps is a service. Reader is a service. Soon replies would also be a service. I don't get the point behind that. Saving grace is all are add-ons once you purchase the pro plan. Not that I am going to.#
- I always find it fascinating to look at the way different blogging systems handle tags. For most, it is a particular field, a metadata around a post. That is so mundane, plain. It's high time we stopped thinking of tags as that. #
- Why do we need tags? We need them so that we can group together posts that talk about an idea. When you ask it as a field while publishing, I have already written about the post. Let me decide what the post is about when I am writing them.#
- A natural way we have accepted to that is through the way of #hashtags on Twitter. Include some identifier and let your blogging engine convert the linked word to a tag. I love this. It is natural to highlight a word while you are writing it. For example, I like to include tags for my #meta posts like this where I am talking about tools around blogging.#
- But doing so is costly for blogging engines and many prefer not to do it. You have to process it post publishing and pull out the tags and update the backend. Write.as does it well. I wish more systems did it.#
- How does this help the readers though? Sure, hashtags as part of body makes it easy for the author. But for a reader, displaying the tags as part of the body can be distracting if redirected to regular list interfaces. But I don't think there is a simpler solution. Another way is how Dave Winer did it on Scripting News (looks to be broken now) where he opens a dialog in which you can swipe through the posts. A nice interface to be frank.
I would love to see other such design patterns for displaying grouped posts. # - What would I want? Add tags as hashtags, elements in the body used for grouping post publishing. When a tag is clicked on, don't redirect to a list - rather display the list along with post in some manner. #