Would be nice to have a non-forum area for writings. You just can't write a full document in 5000 characters. At Forest Of Thought (my site), I always write over 1000 words, and average around 10,000 characters, and as much as 15,000 characters.

For example, I've not finished my shotgun dance tutorial because I've gotten a third of the way down, but then stopped because I ran out of characters (there is actually a bug for squeezing more in, but it slows down typing).

I realize that you have a lot of areas to work on, PIE, and a tutorials/docs section may be low priority, but I would like you to consider it for the future. I'm also not sure how many people would write for it...

Yes... in fact its a pretty good priority after I get the rec system simi-automated. I want }MG{ to have sort of a tip/help/tutorial archive with this sort of thing in it. It would be open to members to add to and have unlimited word count and allow for inserting of pictures. This IS coming in the future  .

May I suggest Wordpress? I love Wordpress. I use it you-know-where. We can hack up a new theme for it easy, and it's beautiful to use. Articles could be categorized, and there are plugins galore. It would also allow you (PIE) to create accounts for people that you know won't spam it, and they could write nice, full articles, people could suggest changes as comments (get spam karma for anti-comment-spam!).

I've used wordpress before. I like it a good deal actually... I very much like writing my own code, especially since i've started doing freelance web-design, its good to say "I did this.. isn't it awesome!".. but at the same time I am doing a lot and WP would be quick.. at least until I get another system up. Its pretty easy to install and update at least (done it several times).

I actually was using wordpress myself.. then I started writing up my own blogging system. Its pretty nice but not done yet and it would be nice to have something stable up and running before i'm done with it...

I know what you mean, and I've done a small program that can manage frontpage news in php (but then accidentally deleted it). That was cool to know that you did it.

But you can program for wordpress -- it's so easy. Plugins and code modifications are as easy as breathing there, and you can modify the templates to include your own code.

However, I would be interested to see your blogging system, and that would probably be more customizable if you were to implement it, since you know the code. BTW, do you have formal education in programming, or did you pick it up?

Well.. Wordpress has something called the "proccess loop" or some such.. the documentation was sort of lacking when I went in and started playing around with it.... I still modded it pretty well, but its nice to say "hey.. i made something better than wordpress".. and if i could ever get done it would indeed be better because of the way i'm building it it would be a lot easier to work with and to plug things into.
I knew some.. and then I went to college for computer science and information science and technology.. and i'm still here.. i'm a senior++.. .. hopefully this will all be over soon. I do PHP almost every day now (0o).

Neat.

Really, a better plugin system than WP? That's an interesting trick, since I've seen plugins change: menus in the controls, the sidebar, add stuff to the bottom of the page, work with the standard functions, generate statistics, import things from other sites, and a whole lot of stuff. Haven't seen anything it hasn't been able to do.

PHP is neat, but I like more... concrete languages -- ones for desktop programming. I'm a fan of GWT though (Google Web Toolkit) -- you should look into that. It allows you to write normal Java code, which it then translates into JavaScript AJAX applications for the web.  If you don't know what AJAX is yet, you're way late, but look it up. It's the web's future. GWT also comes with a set of standard GUI classes, like for buttons, image galleries, moving stuff, menus, etc.

I'll look that up.. and yes i know what ajax is :p.
PHP is awesome.. its the best i've used. I like "more concrete" languages as well, but everything looks like its coming to the web as it is. With bandwidth getting more and more size isn't going to be a problem in the future and PHP/mySQL/HTML/CSS will let you create a database driven interface in minutes.. where using something like java or C++ you have to go through a decent ammount of work to create a textbox without an IDE... I've also heard somewhere you can create desktop apps in PHP actually !

Got me there, there is a way to use GTK+ to write PHP apps for the desktop, and I've read about it too. Once again, Open Source to the rescue.

I'm still skeptical that all apps are going to be web-based though (as in in a browser). I do believe that almost all apps will be using the Internet eventually, but you see, it's already happened once that there was an Internet service boom, where everyone thought that it would be good to have all apps on remote servers, and companies would be able to kinda 'lease' the app and use it, and store data remotely. This fell through hard when computers got cheaper and companies realized that they want to hold onto their own data, and not put it on some server somewhere. Therefore, we have mainly desktop apps. And I think that's fine. With modern tech, you can run your app off a main server, and do it seamlessly with high bandwidth. I don't think that browser AJAX type apps are going to be the majority though. Companies are too paranoid for that, and personally I like how things work now. Desktop toolkits are very well done and mature (see GTK+), and have common themeing, etc. I don't want an OS which is really just a browser, although I could probably manage, once I start using AJAX writer, Google Spreadsheets, Gmail, etc.

throughing this thing completly off topic




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