I was tempted to put a picture of Jimmy Wales in the right margin of the previous post. But I decided on a bigger idea. Why should I be the only one? One day, maybe next week, we should all put pictures of Jimmy Wales on our blogs. WIth whatever slogan you like, it doesn't matter -- just you have to have a picture of Jimbo there so everyone knows... uhh so everyone knows.. what he looks like! Yeah that's it.

 11/29/2010; 10:32:06 PM.   .

We did RSS before the Times did, but when the Times did it, everyone followed. That's good leadership, as ex-Timester Jonathan Glick likes to say (he now runs a stealthish NYC startup). Same thing is happening with paragraph-level permalinks.

The concept of a permalink on a paragraph existed before I implemented them here on Scripting News, but it got enough exposure here to get other people interested, and they've been appearing in a smattering of places on the web, notably in Jay Rosen's PressThink blog.

Then Daniel Bachhuber did a WordPress plug-in, and all of a sudden there are a few dozen sites doing it. He called it WinerLinks as an ode to me and my blog, and I won't discourage it. It's nice to get recognition!

Earlier today Zach Seward tweeted that the Times had done paragraph-level permalinks too. It's a different implementation, but the idea is similar. Instead of the link appearing at the end of the paragraph (seems more natural to me) the Times links appear at the beginning. And instead of appearing by default, you have to click the Shift key twice, with your pinky touching the tip of your nose. Actually it seems to work even if you don't do the pinky thing, but I like to do it anyway.

When you do the magic incantation, nice paragraph symbols appear, and if you mouse over them you get a tool tip and when you click on it, the permalink to the paragraph is placed in the address bar of your browser, ready for you to copy and paste it or shorten and tweet it.

It's good because you can point to the specific bit you want. No more making the inquisitive reader fumble around to point to the bit you're referring to.

Nice!!

I wonder how their editorial tools work. If the author adds a paragraph does that break all the links out there?

Also, is it on all their sites or just some?

Maybe we should have a meetup to discuss it. It's all happening in NYC (a big neener neener to my friends on the west coast) so we could meet at NYU or the Times or at the Starbucks at Astor Place.

 11/29/2010; 10:17:52 PM.   .

I had this great idea a few months back, create a top-level folder in my Dropbox hierarchy where each sub-folder would be the name of a host, like listings.opml.org and daveriver.scripting.com. Then one of my servers, on the same Dropbox net, would make the folder the root of the Apache htdocs directory. A script would run once a minute and look for new folders and update the vhosts.conf file. Then any file I dropped in any of the folders, once it synched would be available on the web.

I was using this system, but the server would flatline a lot, and so would many of the other machines on my Dropbox network. I didn't know what was causing the flatlining until I decided to split things up and make one server into three, so I could isolate which components were interfering. Lo and behold, the machine that flatlined perfectly was the one serving up these fancy folders. So I uninstalled Dropbox on that machine, and started replacing all the cute bits with FTP calls. Yeah it's not so much fun as the magic of Dropbox, but here's the A-B comparison:

Bottom-line: Dropbox is good for sharing files with your colleagues and across your devices, but it can't, at this time, be used to manage a static server running Apache. Too bad, cause it was such a neat idea.

 11/29/2010; 9:23:16 PM.   .