From: Adrian Holovaty (adrianholovaty@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 14:17:48 BST
Oh, jeez. Sorry about the mega-multiple post. Strangely, I only hit "send"
once. Stupid Hotmail.
Adrian
>From: "Adrian Holovaty" <adrianholovaty@hotmail.com>
>To: blogite@aquarionics.com
>Subject: Re: Favourite features
>Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2002 08:15:29 -0500
>
>
>Stuart wrote:
>>What's your favourite technical feature of your weblog? And your
>>favourite design feature?
>
>Oooh, finally a non-XML-RPC question that I have a chance of contributing
>to. :)
>
>On holovaty.com, I have a coupla neat features. As Stuart pointed out,
>there's search-word highlighting. You can also highlight a word or phrase
>on any blog page by appending /?highlight=word to the URL.
>
>Also, there's custom RSS feed capability
>[holovaty.com/content/customfeeds], which basically combines the RSS feed
>with a search engine to syndicate only the content that matches search
>terms. It's all URL-based. For example, holovaty.com/rss/washington returns
>a feed of the latest 5 entries that have the word "washington" in them.
>holovaty.com/rss/site+review returns the entries with "site review". At the
>moment it searches for the exact phrase (i.e., it doesn't "and" the words),
>but I hope to change that one of these days.
>
>I also like having a link to "New comments", which displays the 15 latest
>comments. I set this up because I found that some people were commenting on
>really old entries, and I had no way of knowing about those comments
>without rereading every entry every day. Bah. (Simon Willison has this
>feature, too.)
>
>A few things I haven't implemented yet but have jotted down on my pile o'
>note cards:
>
>--"E-mail me when this blog is updated". Worth it? I dunno. Definitely not
>appropriate for bloggers who post ten or twenty entries a day, but I update
>maybe once or twice a day, so this might be a useful service to provide.
>
>--"E-mail me when a blog entry is posted that contains the word or phrase
>'xxxxxxxx'". Somewhat like the nytimes.com's "News Tracker" (which does the
>same thing with news stories), this is more useful than the previous idea.
>It would be easy to do, but sometimes I change blog entries to add more
>information or fix typos. So when do I send the e-mail? When an entry is
>initially posted? When it's changed? Or do I set up a crontab job that does
>it every day at midnight?
>
>--Permalinks to comments. I want to give each comment a standalone
>permalink page, but I haven't gotten around to doing this yet because I
>can't decide on a proper URL structure. I'm thinking a possible scheme
>could be [holovaty.com/commentarchive/2002-09-05/joe_schmoe] or
>[holovaty.com/archive/2002/09/05/comments/joe_schmoe] (where Joe Schmoe is
>the commenter's name). The problem with the first URL scheme is that I
>would have to set up a /commentarchive page and a
>/commentarchive/2002-09-05 page, which wouldn't necessarily be that useful.
>(I'm a firm believer in making URLs hackable, so I make myself account for
>every subdirectory.)
>
>--Permalinks to parts of blog entries. Some of my entries get really long,
>and I think it would be a good feature to be able to link to a part of it.
>(I had a discussion about this with Stuart, et al, before this nifty e-mail
>list.) I'm still undecided on how this would happen.
>
>--Change the time zone. I've noticed a lot of blogs don't specify which
>time zone they're in, which pretty much makes the timestamp meaningless. I
>put "EST" on mine, and my about page explains my time zone further, but I
>think it would be convenient for the users to convert the times to their
>own zones. I did this in JavaScript on one of my old sites, but I'd rather
>do it on the server side for accessibility's sake.
>
>Adrian
>----
>holovaty.com
>
>
>
>
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