2024-03-02 Oddµ themes

I’ve been working on themes.

themes

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@mastodon.social, and earlier I had seen the media diary by @latte@mastodon.online.

Gibberish

media diary

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 chat 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

(Being able to just paste some HTML into my pages makes me happy…)

Home Today Edit Upload Suchen: Go Chat theme A theme that focuses on appending short paragraphs to existing pages. This theme makes it all look like chat. 😍 Type and submit. 🥳 Hm. 🤔 I think I like it! 😄 More themes! 👀

​#Oddµ

I was talking about this on fedi with @bouncepaw@merveilles.town and said I could perhaps take the usernames, do 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?

In his reply, Timur reminded me of the fact I would need a special syntax for that and how the syntax to denote authors on Community Wiki was not ideal. In the end, he ended with: “it's impossible to keep a publishing system pure Markdown.”

It’s the truth. 😳

Let’s try not to complicate things. Perhaps a little HTML would go a long way, for example. 😅