I’m enjoying Zspace, Coach Albert’s entreaties and the Zspace offerings finally motivated me to have a public blog. Big breakthrough for me. I used to have a private blog that I used the way I use evernote.com now. That experience got me thinking it would be nice to have a Zspace Press This! function. It’s a little Javascrip Shortcut in your browser that grabs whatever you’ve selected on a web page along with the url and puts you into your blog editing interface. I was thinking it would be funny to name it ZeeIt! but than would resonate wrong for anyone that’s been through puberty in Gringoland(USA). How about ZThis!, it sound like ‘See This!’.. I might be getting ahead of myself here though.
If I had unlimited time I’d spend a couple hours with my Rhino book (O’Reilly’s big Javascript Tome) and try to figure out how to do it. It might not even be possible without knowing how the Zspace/Net application works though.
Also it would be nice to have a blockquote button in this blog (fsck?) editor. It would be nice to have a little form pop up, like when you push the link url button (with the world and chain link icon). I’d like to be able to just paste in a link in the url text part of the form and then some text in a textarea. Having Text separated by space put in between paragraph tags and the whole thing enclosed in blockquote tags complete with the cite attribute filled would save me a lot of time. It would help the zspace blogs be more in line with all the ‘semantic web’ standards – maybe bump people’s blogs up in the search engines too. Oh and taking a hint from this Javascript Guru and the 24ways guy it would be helpful to generate a ‘Source’ Link at the bottom (and top too with long quotes, just be discrete about it)
Also, this admin interface is ok but most of the pages on Znet have messed up head tags. A lot of style and script information is between the html declaration and the starting head tag. I’m pretty sure that’s a no-no. And the W3 validator supports this hunch. " Line 5, Column 61: document type does not allow element "script" here; assuming missing "head" start-tag" One of the loops in the html-generating code must be starting too soon, it’s not in loop that spits out the head tags.
The old Znet site had all kinds of empty font tags and things too. At one point, years ago, I started messing with my Perl/LWP book to see if I could get a script to fix that but I had to move onto other things. It looks like JavaScript’s Dom could take care of all that now though.
Not to be a pain in the ass or anything but I thought these little tweaks might help. I’m trying to find time to make myself a little Javascript blockquote tool to save me the time I spend mucking around in the source for my blog entries. It would be nice to have the blockquote links automatically accessible to readers. I keep noticing that I have to go back and make the source link clickable, and more obvious. Depending on the site you paste int the paragraphs are separated by break tags or some other inappropriate trick. I’d like to see the Znet HTML and CSS be as sleek and functional as the substance (analysis and values) you find on the site.
Besides making quoting on blogs more ‘semantic’ html-like and cleaning up a lot of repetititve tags, it would (potentially) make the debating in the comments more exact and worthwhile. I just had an epiphany – maybe a comment context could offer a special quoting button that would link to text and credit the author of the comment being responded too.
I was motivated to make these (possibly) time-saving suggestions after appreciating the QuickEdit Feature so much.
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