ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web

I'd like this to be the year that Ode really hits its stride. To my way of thinking that means, among other things:

• Documentation
• Cleaning up the website(s)
• More addins and themes

• Slowly and carefully reviewing ode.cgi itself

  Making small improvements here and there, and planning for the next release.

• A t-shirt :)

Documentation is the most important piece of this in my mind (if just narrowly), so I can think of no better way to celebrate Ode's first birthday. I've been working on documentation for a couple of days now and will continue to do so consistently.

So, Where is the documentation anyway?

Well it's an interesting question. If you're someone who has struggled to find info about Ode, you might be surprised (maybe disbelieving is a better word), when I say that the documentation has been here all along!

Let me explain...

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Most of this is either fairly self-explanatory or covered by the documentation at simpleviewer.net. There really is nothing specific to Ode about using SimpleViewer. (That's the point after all :) Still if you're looking for a detailed step-by-step walk through along with a couple of suggestions, you might want to read this through.

Regardless, give SimpleViewer a try. I think you'll like it.

You might prefer to read this relatively long post using the text_page theme.

I've decided to tackle photo galleries for this first how-to for several reasons:

1. Photos are important and speak directly to the idea of 'the personal web' I like to think about. Integrating photos with a weblog is a unique and compelling way to share experiences. Photos on their own are a little abstract and captions don't help enough. Tags, though informative are about as pleasant to read as an entry in a library catalog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog). A weblog post gives context to the photos while the photos enliven the text. It's a perfect marriage. I'd love to see more Ode sites featuring lots and lots of photos.

2. It's pretty straight-forward and the results are really nice. Though people post lots of photos to social media sites, this is an area where I believe weblogs have the advantage.

3. There's a particular solution I really like and want to talk about.

Let's get started.

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The goal of these how-tos is two fold:

1. To serve as a very practical resource to help you accomplish the sorts of things you might want to do with your Ode site, integrating a photo gallery for example.

2. To serve as a reminder of advantages of the Open Web. The fact that these solutions work for Ode with no direct coordination or collaboration (as they work with many other platforms) is a testament to the true value of Open. It is because of open that I can claim quite sincerely that a humble little application like Ode is in a lot of ways on par with Facebook and other platforms which enjoy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment and legions of full and part-time developers.

Hopefully there will be a bunch.

Want to write a howto yourself? I'd encourage you to do it. If you'd like my input, feel free to email me directly (or you can discuss it on the forum.

As the year the project was officially released, 2010 will always be an important year for Ode. But this little project is still a baby. The good news is that after the first year I have every reason to believe the Ode is workable. Nothing has happened to make me change my mind about that, and that's really positive. The bad news, if you want to call it that, is a lot of work to do!

If Ode were an infant it would be taking its first tentative steps, and shifting to new kinds of play (from fine motor control to bigger movements). The advice would be that each baby is an individual and develops at his or her own pace. Though admittedly somewhat of a stretch, in this context I'd say Ode is right on track.

As some of you know I believe that while intentionally small and simple, I believe Ode is an important project representing a crucial point of view.

I'm a proponent of the open web, and you're at all interested in Ode I'm guessing you are too.

Access to information has never been more important - of course there has never been a time when I wouldn't have said the same thing. The point is that the open, distributed nature of the web makes it exceedingly important. What has been demonstrated in the last couple of decades is that open and distributed solutions that scale as the web has, both in terms of architecture and acceptance, is a very rare thing. We have it now, for once, and may not get it again any time soon. We should cherish it.

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Ode's dated themes are a trick I haven't seen in any other package. The ability to roll back the look and content of a site to exactly what it was at any point in time is unique. It's part of my goal to make Ode a personal publishing platform. The fact is that the web is immense and most sites are not visited frequently.

As in real life, most people will never be famous on the web. (The reason why fame is so valuable is because it is a very rare thing.)

So why have a site at all?

It's a question most people with a weblog or other site have struggled with at times. Sure, occasionally you'll have people stumble onto a particular post from a search results page, but it's very unlikely that person will become a regular visitor. It certainly doesn't justify all of the time and effort that goes into maintaining an active website.

So why do it then?

My answer to that question is a question, why get out of bed in the morning? Why do so many people go to soulless jobs, and in many other ways deal with the tedium of daily life? Well there are those of us driven by a cause to the near exclusion of everything else. But, for most of us, I would argue it's just that, us. We do it for ourselves, our friends, and families. I believe you are the best reason for you to maintain a website. Because it's interesting to you (whoever you are), your friends and family.

It's tremendously powerful to be able to take a look back at what you were doing, and what you were thinking about, a year or a decade ago. It's a wonderful thing to be able to share experiences with those few people who are genuinely interested in knowing about you and what you're doing. Some of the best weblogs are stories of personal experiences with photos, videos, links to news and other things of interest, surrounded by enough text to stitch together a narrative and provide context. Sure the story may be interesting to only a very niche audience, but for those few, it is likely to be one of their favorites.

I say forget social. Let's make the web personal!

In July I first announced that I was thinking of moving the community forum for Ode.

After recently upgrading to the latest version of Vanilla from an early release candidate, it seemed like as good a time as any.

The new address is: http://forum.ode-is-simple.com

Please update your bookmarks.

Here's a little poem to help you remember:

The community forum for Ode has moved.
The address was ode-is-simple.com/vanilla2_forum,
and now it's forum.ode-is-simple.com.
Hope to see you there.

Maybe not the most beautiful of poems but informative :)

Download Editedit

First things first, what is Editedit?

The short answer is that it's an Ode addin that allows you to edit posts via a browser based form much like you would create an edit posts with Wordpress, update your Facebook account via the facebook.com website, or interact with twitter.com (or any number of other sites).

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Before we get to Mrkdwn let's discuss Markdown on the Markdown_addin on which it is based.

Download the Mrkdwn addin (.zip)

Markdown

Ode has always supported the Markdown syntax via the Markdown addin, which is included (and enabled by default) with Ode itself. That addin is no more than a very thin wrapper around the original markdown perl script (markdown.pl).

All I did was include the necessary Ode interface bits to work Markdown conversion into Ode.

For anyone who might be interested, here's what that looks like:

The accesstitletagsandbody_early interface allow addins look at and modify the content of each post by providing separate references to the posts title, tags, and body.

sub access_title_tags_and_body_early
{

  $$body_ref_l = Markdown($$body_ref_l);

  1;
}

The Markdown addin simply passes the body of the post (as a reference) to the Markdown routine, which handles the Markdown conversion. Not so hard to understand, right? The actual routine isn't quite this simple, but everything else is just overhead. This is really all the Markdown addin is doing.

(That $1 at before the closing curly brace let's the thing that calls the routine -ode in this case- know that everything went as expected.)

I really like Markdown and I think it does just about everything we need it to do. Sure it doesn't provide a syntax for tables, definition lists, footnotes, abbreviations, and other sorts of things, but I'm not convinced that there is a substantial benefit to expanding the syntax to do any of that.

Here is what Markdown's creator has to say about it:

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.

That little blurb makes a lot of sense to me. Fortunately, Markdown can be used seamlessly with HTML, so what markdown doesn't do isn't impossible - and it's not any more difficult than it would be without Markdown.

I think we should appreciate that HTML really is a pretty good markup language itself and the fact that it's so prevalent (much more so than Markdown or any of the simplified markdown syntaxes) has it's advantages when it comes to doing fancier/more structural stuff.

Having said that, and for what it's worth, between Ode's themes which separate the structure of a page from post content, and given the subset of HTML that Markdown does support, I rarely find myself writing in a way that requires me to include a lot of explicit HTML.

There are a few very specific things about Markdown that bother me after using Markdown for years.

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Be a full-fledged participant on the web and do it on your terms, using apps you're already familiar w, as easily as working w local files.

Build a website using standards compliant HTML and CSS, write posts, create photo galleries, host videos, interact with web services, and do just about anything else you might imagine.

Envision a platform that allows you to more actively participate in the web on your terms. A personal publishing platform that offers literally unlimited potential for personal expression and experimentation whether you're interested in web design and development - even if you think it might be too difficult for you. (It's probably not - as long as you're willing to learn a thing or two along the way.)

Now imagine you can do all of this using your favorite apps and working with local* files - copying, moving, renaming, deleting files and folders just like you already know how to do.

Is it really local?

Many of file transfer application allow you to connect to your remote storage space as if it were a locally mounted volume. It looks and acts just like a drive connected directly to your Mac via USB. This allows you to treat your Ode site as if it were running on your local drive but all of the changes that you make are taking place live on your site. This style of interaction works particularly well with Ode. With no database to worry about, and cryptic data stores, you already know how to work with Ode. Open your favorite text editor, write your post, save the file directly to your site using a standard open/save dialog box, and you're done. Your new post is now live on the web. Of course your favorite app offers a wealth of functionality that make writing your posts a joy spell checking, auto completion, advanced search and replace, syntax highlighting, etc. Maybe most importantly it offers you an environment you're already comfortable with including all of your preferences and other tweaks. What's more, you're not limited to any one single app. Simultaneously run, and switch between an text editor, and GUI HTML/CSS, photo management, video editing apps, and more.

Why trade all of this for the glorified text boxes that you get with other content management systems and weblog packages?

Sound good? (I think so too.)

New version of the 'logic' the Ode 1.x default theme. You might guess that there aren't any major changes, and you'd be sort-of right.

Most of the changes involve reworking the underlying markup, but there are noticeable changes to the look of the theme as well (e.g. fonts are a little bigger all around, the date lines in the post area have changed, etc.)

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