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Alex Schroeder

I recently saw two examples of chat-like interfaces for things that were regular text files or web pages. One was the app Gibberish by @zhenyi :
https://andadinosaur.com/gibberish-is-now-available-on-testflight
Earlier, I had seen the media diary by @latte :
https://anhvn.com/media/
And I wondered. It feels a bit like we're used to chat. It gives us that feeling of intimacy. Would I want that extra emotional push to get me to write, or would I abhor the idea of publishing something that I wrote in a vulnerable moment? Or is it more like those toot-storms of people that turn their blog posts into a post-per-paragraph? You know who I mean. 😅
My previous website engine had comments but my blog didn't have many commenters. Often it was just me, appending stuff! Which is why my current engine has both "edit" and "add" actions. And themes. And I started thinking… Shouldn't it be possible to… maybe… ah yes! And here it is: A theme for the website engine that has the "add" action at the bottom of every page, and renders paragraphs like speech bubbles. It looks… very different.

Chat theme:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/themes/chat/README

Regular theme, for comparison:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/oddmu/themes/alexschroeder.ch/README

5 comments
the bouncing paw 🎃

@alex @zhenyi @latte love it! Thought about having chat bubbles in wikis before, but thought more about separate markup for that.

Alex Schroeder

@bouncepaw I guess I could take the usernames, so some hashing on them, and give bubbles random colors? Or the "owner" gets coloured bubbles and everybody else is simple "a guest"? As soon as more people can add to a page, it gets complicated. Do I add names?

the bouncing paw 🎃

@alex you'd need a special syntax for that. Let's not repeat CW's mistakes with its complicated syntax for names. What if the bubble paragraph starts with “name:”?

= Comments
Alex: should I add commenting by other people?

Timur: that would be convenient and I'd use it.

Timur: but I kinda feel you should not...

Timur: also note how it's impossible to keep a publishing system pure Markdown.

Alex Schroeder

@bouncepaw i need “it's impossible to keep a publishing system pure Markdown” taped to my forehead!

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