I hate blogs.
It's not that I hate them, really; I just don't like the "diary" format. It doesn't suit my needs very well.
However, I have this day job, you know, just like you probably do. And that takes up most of my time. If there's any time left, I'd like to spend some amount of it actually blogging, as opposed to dicking around endlessly with software and configuration just to enable me to blog the way I want to. If I'm going to dick around with coding stuff, I'd rather do something other than that.
But I hate blogs. The format's not right. Chronological ordering of my posts just plain sucks. It forces you to dig around through monthly archives, wondering if there's anything good in all the crap I spew out.
What I want is closer to my own personal Reddit, or Digg, or something like that (but not quite like them, either). I don't want you to come to my site and see what I've posted most recently. RSS can take care of that. I want you to see what other people have voted as my best entries. On my site. You shouldn't have to go to Reddit to get a decent directory of my blog. Anyway, you can't; anything that makes it onto Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us is mixed in with everything else, and gets bumped down into oblivion by stuff that's newer and/or better.
Blog entries should be organized by popularity, not time. Or ideally, you can pick either one. Why the hell don't blogs do that?
But it's got to be even better than that. Having a self-organizing browse interface like Digg's on my blog page would be nice, but I want more.
For instance, I want inline comments. Putting everyone's comments at the end is pretty lame. Even worse, most blog packages these days don't even seem to have Slashdot-style threaded commenting. Instead, the comments are ordered chronologically, just like the entries. So the comment threads are invisible, and commenters have to say stuff like "um, actually I was replying to Dave, not Peter", and quote each other heavily -- a whole subculture of commenter hacks, just to fake threading.
Why the hell don't blogs have threaded comments? Sure, sure, some do. But that's still not enough. Not by a long shot. They need threaded comments and inline comments.
What do I mean by inline comments? I want people to point at a particular sentence I wrote, get all excited or pissed off about it, and say "I want to comment on THIS! This point right here!" So when you're reading, you should get to that part, and see a little icon or link that takes you off to a comment thread on that particularly interesting or disputed section.
In other words, the commentary on a blog entry should grow outward, not downward.
And I want versions. I want to make changes to my entries sometimes -- heck, frequently. But that's culturally weird, and feels dishonest to me, because I've sort-of permanently overwritten the old version. I think people have a right to see how my ideas changed over time, after they yelled at me or made brilliant observations or whatever. So people should be able to see the revision history for individual posts.
It's starting to sound slightly Wiki-like, isn't it? Yeah, a little. But what I want doesn't exist today. It's not a blog, and it's not a wiki, but it's similar to both of them. I want an essay-publishing system, basically.
All that revision-history stuff complicates the commenting, of course; each comment has to keep metadata about which blog revision it was talking about. It's even more complicated if you have versioned comments, so users can go back and fix their typos or change their minds. But it's not like that stuff's impossible, is it? Aren't there companies whose full-time efforts are going into making cool blog software?
Blogs have evolved into the dominant form of self-publishing, and yet nobody's doing it right. To me, that can only mean one of two things, both depressing. Either nobody's been clever enough to figure out an interface that actually works for people who aren't just posting their daily cat picture, or web programming is so insanely hard that nobody's been able to get features out fast enough to keep pace with the ideas.
It's probably a little of both. But my God, if they're hurting for ideas, all they need to do is ask. They're bursting from me; I can't keep them in anymore.
Want some? OK. Here's one: I'm sick of global configuration options. Global config options are so 1970s. When I go into Firefox, I want to be able to override every single configuration option on a per-page basis, or even better, with url pattern-matching rules. Doesn't that seem just patently obvious? And yet there aren't any browsers that let you do that. (Or are there? You tell me. Wouldn't it be nice if you could put an inline comment right here letting me and all the readers know?)
Same goes for my blog software: I want per-post configuration. It seems like I should be able to specify different stylesheet templates for each entry if I want — at least for different categories. Technical posts should have a different stylesheet from the posts about my last vacation.
And I should be able to change the settings for how I'm notified about comments on a per-post basis, because I'll care more about some of them than others.
Isn't all this stuff obvious? How can people not think of this stuff?
Oh, and not to put too fine a point on it, but how about a decent content-editing tool? Blog software packages can't seem to get this simple thing right. You pretty much get simple "convert line breaks" behavior, or you can embed HTML tags and screw with them for hours until you figure out how to make the blog HTML renderer behave the way the exact same tags work in every other page in your browser. If you're lucky. Sometimes it's just impossible, and you have to live with their screwed-up interpretation of the spacing before/after an ordered list or a heading element or whatever.
Can it really be that hard to get this stuff right? O'Reilly's group blogs don't even put a frigging blank line after a heading element, so your first sentence is smooshed right up under the heading.
I'm not asking for WYSIWIG here; I realize that's almost impossible given the amazingly crappy mix of browser technology standards we have to work with today. All I'm asking for is something halfway decent, like you get from any Wiki worth its salt. RedCloth would be my personal preference, but gosh, just about any wiki-style markup language would be preferable to the current choices ("convert line breaks" or "embed HTML tags that don't work properly") that most blog systems give you.
So I've been meaning to set up a public blog for nearly a year, and I haven't done it because all the blog-hosting options are just so wrong. I've been struggling with this whole issue -- not having the right self-publishing software -- and wondering whether to try writing it myself, or to just bite the bullet and live with the crap that's out there today.