Why is all the text a giant image? (That aside, the system looks great)
Why did you have to point that out? I quickly transitioned from "ho-hum" to "must kill".
Ghost — rethinking WordPress
221–230 of 236 posts
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble? As a huge fan of the WordPress community and what the software and platform has empowered, I'm seeing a decreasing amount of interest in blogging as my social network turns toward meme-sharing and 140-character quips simply because they're much more conducive to consumption and sharing on mobile. It's so bad that there…
I used to think that "mobile responsiveness" was the "Holy Grail" of smart website design. Now, I've come to the conclusion that most modern mobile devices are completely capable of displaying the full version of most websites. Every time I use my iPhone to browse to Twitter or LinkedIn I'm taken away from the full site and to a silly "mobile" site that resembles the native app. If I wanted the native app. experience…
I have to disagree with this one. Just having a mobile stylesheet with a sane font size and clickable link sizes makes a huge difference on most websites. Take this site for example, reading it is quite difficult on a phone, I'm always finding myself panning/pinch/zooming in comment threads, and I constantly misclick links on the home page.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#223How much money you got for Macbook ads? They are annoying. And having nothing common with blogging platform idea.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, none of them? It doesn't include other domains and it shouldn't include other domains. Really, it is being exceedingly generous in that estimation already. Hosting thousands of totally independent, small sites is trivial, and does not require scaling wordpress in any significant way. Facebook is one site, all their data needs to be able to be accessed by all their software. Bob's blog and Joe's blog are totally i…
That's sort of like saying Facebook scaling is a "non-issue" because it's just a bunch of small, independent profile pages. Of course some elements can and should be sharded, but that doesn't mean that scaling is trivial, especially as you get into more advanced and social features and a rapidly increasing percentage of traffic is logged in and fully dynamic. I think we agree that "scaling" small (sub-RAM-size) amoun…
Except that as I pointed out, facebook isn't independent pages. Wordpress.com is tons of tiny, entirely independent sites. That's like claiming godaddy is a top 10 website because they host tons of little PHP sites. Tons of little sites is not the same as one big site.
I realize lots of people run wordpress. That doesn't support the claim that it easily scales to the traffic demands of a top 10 site.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found this out last year when I offered markdown support on my forum that used traditional bbcode. I run a collaborative writing forum and, newly obsessed with markdown at the time, I figured that since users were mostly writing many paragraphs of text, they could pick up the markdown basics if a toolbar + cheatsheet helped them out. In my head, it was going to be some sort of amazing improvement and my forum commu…
There might be a hump to get over at first, but I think Markdown is going to be by far the best to go for in the long run. What did your cheatsheet look like?
My cheatsheet was a simple condensed table of "this | produces this" beneath the post textfield.
Also, other communities that deal with a similar audience had the same problem with Markdown and moved back to BBCode. For example, these guys (http://guildwork.com/forum/threads/4e46f3d5205cb22721000765-...) moved from BBCode to Markdown and then ended up moving back and writing their own BBCode parser in Python.
Markdown is good when users have limited syntactical/formatting options. But BBCode makes it easier to extend features with an intuitive syntax that nobody seems to have trouble with.
One example would be Markdown's dependence on character glyphs:
[click here](http://google.com)
preformatted
text
[img]mypuppy.jpg[/img]
[url="http://google.com"]click here[/url]
[code]
preformatted
text
[/code]
[dice]4d6[/dice]
[youtube]http://youtube.com/v?i2h38aoj[/youtube]
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
A "normal blog"? That requires that one define normal, with a set of metrics, it also requires a set of websites to be analyzed. Should that set be all blogs hosted with WordPress or Blogger than yes, normal becomes having comments, because that's the default option. But, if you use a different set, say a group of people who use Jekyll or another static site generator, than normal turns into no comments. Do we includ…
How about following the definition you yourself picked? >Although not a requirement, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Even with a reference to an academic paper and exactly what i said prior. > You can't say that a "normal" blog has comm…
I wrote a response, but HN ate it, and I don't really care to rewrite it.
Basically, you've got a very exclusive view of what is a blog, and I think you've got the wrong definition of a blog. You say that your blog requires comments and wouldn't exist without them. To me, that sounds a lot more like a discussion forum than a blog.
Look at any top blog today, do they need comments. Would they disappear without them? Or, are the comments just a nice feature that people enjoy, but doesn't really change the nature of what they publish?
To me, comments are to blogs as radios are to cars. Sure, most cars have radios, but they don't need them to function. It makes the definition a whole lot more inclusive, and it should ring true to everyone. Cars of old did not have radios, blogs of old did not have comments, but as they've aged they both added new features that people enjoy (radios and comments), but to function properly, neither needs them.
If a "blog" is dependent on comments, I argue that it isn't a blog, because what is a blog but an online journal? Each of the five definitions I posted (four of which you failed to even look at or comment on) says that blogs are online diaries or journals based on experiences or hobbies. Only Wikipedia mentions comments, and only Wikipedia says "most good" blogs have them. While they may have them, there is no functional requirement that they have to be there, same with the car radio.
All cellphones have more functions than just calling a phone number and being portable. They can all store contacts in them, most have calculators, most have some personalizations you can make. Because they all have contacts, and most have calculators, do all cellphones have to have them to be considered a cellphone?
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Your server part irks me. It irks me because it's wrong. You're defining the software that runs on top of the server as the server itself. Generic servers (apache, lighttpd, nginx, thin, etc) have no idea how to process a *back call. They can read POST requests, but they'll just forward that on to the software running on top of the server.
Sure, one could modify them to know how to process those requests in the specified manner, but than they wouldn't be the generic server, they'd be a specialized server.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#227You should also develop a seamless and easy way to migrate blogs off of Wordpress and/or Wordpress.com.
I also agree that they are taking WP to do too much and if you look at the history, it all seems like trying to keep up with the popular trends everywhere.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#228A suggested fork of Wordpress (but not GPLed like Wordpress,) that requires giving external entities control of the comments on your blog, and with nothing but a few mockups in Photoshop to show for?
I'm guessing all the 477 points came from those looking at the pretty pictures but ignoring the text (two extra points could have been awarded by the author and his SO.)
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
There might be a hump to get over at first, but I think Markdown is going to be by far the best to go for in the long run. What did your cheatsheet look like?
My cheatsheet was a simple condensed table of "this | produces this" beneath the post textfield. Also, other communities that deal with a similar audience had the same problem with Markdown and moved back to BBCode. For example, these guys ( http://guildwork.com/forum/threads/4e46f3d5205cb22721000765-... ) moved from BBCode to Markdown and then ended up moving back and writing their own BBCode parser in Python. Markd…
That’s a great point about the inherent ability to extend the number of tags that isn’t inherently present in Markdown.
I am currently writing a forum CMS (http://pygm.us/IbkgNZ4d), and I, too, have wondered how to expand the number of tags within a rigid nomenclature. Using a lexer that automatically converts links to tweets and YouTube videos to embedded scripts seems like an unintuitive solution, but on the other hand, people unfamiliar with the commands will automatically display the embeds in their posts.
For commands that don’t convert links, I was thinking about something like '::' with an expandable list of whatever people prefer. Something Awful already use this model for their emoticons, and it could be extended to things like images in general like states for election conversation and such.
I have always found the `[url]` solution to be incredibly bothersome and to some extent unintuitive, and with the advent of mobile devices, letting people write their posts in as few characters as possible is a big advantage to be taken into consideration when weighing the pros and cons.
Re: Ghost — rethinking WordPress
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about following the definition you yourself picked? >Although not a requirement, most good quality blogs are interactive, allowing visitors to leave comments and even message each other via GUI widgets on the blogs, and it is this interactivity that distinguishes them from other static websites. Even with a reference to an academic paper and exactly what i said prior. > You can't say that a "normal" blog has comm…
I wrote a response, but HN ate it, and I don't really care to rewrite it. Basically, you've got a very exclusive view of what is a blog, and I think you've got the wrong definition of a blog. You say that your blog requires comments and wouldn't exist without them. To me, that sounds a lot more like a discussion forum than a blog. Look at any top blog today, do they need comments. Would they disappear without them? O…
I still think you shouldn't dismiss the historical technial evolution blogs took. Words have connotations which can differ, but with blogs there really is the interactivity a distinguishing factor. Dismissing them misses their core.
I didn't react to the other definitions because they mean nothing. Your wordpress-Glossary has an entry for comments. The Blogger-definitions talk about how visitors may comment. Sorry, all of that points to my definition. Note that the latter interactivity-part of the wikipedia-definition is not necessarily related to "good blogs" but to all blogs.
If you want to have analogies: Disregarding comments in blogs but calling normal websites a blog is like calling a bike a car because it drives.
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Server do one thing: They listen to requests on a port and forward them to a script, or serve the corresponding file. Reacting to such a request is normal business, and implementing trackbacks and pingbacks is a three-liner. They are not more of an artifical extraodinary thing than a php-script serving some output. Don't see what the classification as complex and weird here aims to.
PS: I hate it when HN eats comments!