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   The lengths I go to for your hypertext environnment for reading pleasure

One of the many reasons I stopped blogging for so long (a post in May [1], a
few in August [2], then nothing til January 1^st [3]) is that it felt too
much like work. And in looking back, I see I've been bitching about this
topic for at least ten years now [4], and sadly, the process I go through
making an entry today is the same as it was ten years ago. It's the process
of writing raw HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to be posted on the blog.

At least the actual act of submitting a post to be published by mod_blog [5]
(the engine that runs my blog) is automated.

Another issue is that I can't quite type fast enough to get my thoughts out.
Couple that with my desire to actually use HTML as it was intended (you know,
to provide a hypertext environment for reading) causes me to stumble. It also
doesn't help that I'm also thinking about several different things at once
[okay, don't forget to link back to the 2002 bitch entry] [Done. —Editor]
[also, don't forget to talk about throwww and geeze, there's already thirteen
tabs just for this entry alone] [Also done. —Editor]. No wonder my Lovely and
Talented Copy Editor has her work cut out for her.

Sure, I could use a simpler markup langauge, like say, Markdown [6] [make
sure I get back and make a link here] [Done. —Editor] but I know HTML; why
bother learning a half-baked markup language that isn't really designed for a
hypertext environment for reading (in my opinion).

Throwww [7] [oh, almost forgot to mention that I found the link at Hacker
News [8]] appears to be a system where you can edit the page directly (much
like the original idea Tim Berners-Lee had when he wrote the first web
browser [9] [and here I would go off and try to find pages to link to about
Tim Berners-Lee's ideas about editing webpages directly in the browser, but I
don't want to digress and … oh, lost the thought … oh, wait, got it back.]
[four, count them, four, tabs to find a suitable link. —Editor] but there
doesn't appear to be a way see the rendered results and it appears to use its
own half-baked markup language.

Blech.

Distraction Free Writing [10] (also via Hacker News [11]) also uses Markdown
(what? Is HTML too damn hard for people to use that we must use a watered
down half-baked [12] ill-specified [don't forget to link to the author of
Markdown refusing to standardize it [13]] [Done. —Editor] formatting language
that isn't nearly as expressive as HTML?) and does have a way of previewing
the results (that's nice) but it's hardly distraction free what with the
exceedingly loud typing noises it makes (at the time—it seems the author of
Distrction Free Writing received enough negative feedback to have fixed that)
exceeds the loud typing noises my keyboard [14] [don't forget a link there
either] [Done. —Editor] makes.

To compound the problems, a solution I had [15] [link to 2008/12/03.1 [16]]
[Done. —Editor] no longer works, as sometime over the past year the version
of Firefox [yet another link] [Nah, forget the link to Firefox. It caused us
enough pain. —Editor] autoupdated itself into oblivion (that is—the last
update broke on my Linux system so bad I can't even run it) so now I'm forced
to use Firefox 1.5 that came installed on the system (yes yes, I'm running a
version of Firefox that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, but then
again, anything software related that is older than twenty minutes is as old
as the dinosaurs and I'll stop here before I digress on the obessiveness of
constant upgrades our industry forces upon us) and thus, the program I used
to construct <BLOCKQUOTE>s doesn't like Firefox 1.5.

Crap.

So now it's time to go back through some twenty tabs, adding links to make
that oh so nice hypertext environment for reading.

[A total of twenty-three webpages were referenced (not necessarily linked to)
in the making of this post for your hypertext environment for reading
pleasure. —Editor]

[The Editor here is not to be confused with the Lovely and Talented Copy
Editor. –Editor]

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2012/05/12.1
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2012/08
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2013/01/01.1
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/07/11.2
[5] https://boston.conman.org/about/
[6] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[7] http://throwww.com/
[8] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017911
[9] http://info.cern.ch/NextBrowser.html
[10] http://solitarydesigns.net/write/
[11] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017146
[12] http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/faq.html#what-are-some-big-questions-that-the-markdown-spec-does-not-answer
[13] http://www.mail-archive.com/markdown-discuss@six.pairlist.net/msg02703.html
[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_M_keyboard
[15] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/12/03.1
[16] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/12/03.1

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