Some links to outliners and two others, totally unrelated. Read more

An outburst of links, list-y, in a run-on sentence like way. Read more

I keep returning to Peter K. Sheerin’s The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters). It’s not only useful for looking up HTML entities, it’s also an excellent article on typography in general.

So always remember: while em dashes (—) are long and en dashes (–) are exactly half as long, the soft hyphen (�) is so shy that it’s rarely seen — and when it is, it’s only because it’s caught dangling.

Two other interesting typography sites I visited today are the Graphion Online Type Museum and Textism’s Word HTML Cleaner.

I just installed Peerkat. Installation was a piece of cake (and now I also know that I have Python XML Modules included in my Python package) and now I'm poking around the software. You run the Python modules feeder.py and server.py and then use Peerkat as a Web site running at your localhost.

Hmm. Can’t figure out how to subscribe to new feeds. It complains that the feeds I added were bad. This is because Peerkat supports only RSS 1.0, though by upgrading Orchard-Python (written by Ken MacLeod?!), it should (sort of) work with 0.9x feeds...

And it did! It worked!

Christian Crumlish of Radio Free Blogistan writes about developing a Personal Expression Platform (PEP). This is exactly what I’ve been thinking of building for the relaunch of this blog. I’m constantly torn between wanting my own blog to be pointers (uh, links) for family and friends, reference material (notes and bookmarks) for myself, a public diary and a playground for writing and other literary experiments. PEP would facilitate all of these.

In practice, I think I’ll be dividing all this material through categorization. It’s not a perfect system (I seem to find categorization impossible), but ’s the best I can think of. Limiting access to the different levels isn’t all that important to me but implementing tiered access later would be trivial.