News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 26

I've got a rudimentary image/file management system working in NewsBruiser. It's ugly and not everything is implemented, but you can add attachments to an entry, delete attachments from an entry, view a particular attachment, and view all the attachments from a date range. The downside is that I don't want to work on it any more. Which is why sleep was invented.

Brian Donovan has been defending from no one in particular my habit of talking endlessly about NewsBruiser. I will, accordingly, indulge said habit (this also indulges my habit of talking about my personal life, since NewsBruiser and sleeping is all I've been doing for the past 20 hours).

The image upload code is nicer now, and it is now useful in conjunction with NewsBruiser instead of being a completely separate piece of functionality that happens to share an interface, and I've started using it on this site (see screenshot which is brought to you by the technology of which it's a screenshot). This needs testing before I'm comfortable with another release, though. If anyone thinks this feature is cool and would like to test what's in CVS, I'd love that (or I can make a tarball for you if you're scared of CVS, as I once was).

Spam: "Do others ogle at your mane of curls, never knowing the behind-the-scenes beauty battles that you endure?" Why, yes, that's me to a tee!

I finally remembered where the idea of the little permalink triangle came from: not, as I once thought, from Doc Searls' site, but from a project I did with Peter Hodgson where we did a hypertext version of Diary of a Madman. The triangle interrupted the main text to signal an entry into the thicket of hypertextual readings below.

Why, you ask, did we not instead make use of that marvel of HTML, the text link? I'm not sure (I'd never even asked myself that question until just now). Probably because I was trying for an exact lookalike of the earlier HTML version, which was itself a lookalike of a version done in some proprietary hypertext system, which was itself a lookalike of a version done in a third hypertext system, and so on back 10 or 15 years to the dawn of PC hypertext systems (my version is called 'madman7', and there's talk between Peter and I of a madman8). Somewhere in the DOS era there was probably a hypertext system that didn't know about or didn't want to rely on terminal bold or reverse video to signify linked text, and so displayed the link as an asterisk next to the linked text. I actually think madman7 looks nicer with the triangle than it would with linked text, but I may have to revisit that.

Anyway, here's the triangle, the colors darkened a little for NewsBruiser: . I like it better than the old triangle I made by hand , so I'm going to start using it for NYCB and after I check with Peter I'm going to make it the NewsBruiser default permalink image.

Note the subtle use of attachments there.

Kevan, Claydonia is another fun build-your-own-everything combat game played with children's creativity toys (in this case, modelling clay or Play-Do^TM).