Purple numbers & linkablity

Recently Eugene wrote a blog post about the linking of event information and social networks. He mentioned a post i made about 43things, and also ended up poking me about adding ‘purple numbers’ to my blog.

I’ve thought about it purple numbers and also the way Eugene has a mixed blog wiki. To me the implementation of purple numbers advocated by eugene and the purple wiki is a big part of the flaw. What he’s trying to do is say, let’s make it easy for anybody to link in to pages. That i agree with. The web should have finer grain linking than just pages. Often i find myself opening up pages looking to see if anybody didn’t actually add anchors. When it’s there i link to it. But it’s impossible to expect most users to do that.

So eugene has this system where he inserts in these links to indicate anchors which look like this (JV7), only a light purple color. It doesn’t look good. It looks funny, odd. It’s been my primary issue with purple numbers. Sure we should be able to link to any paragraph, but why do i care what the link is called? So the link should be just # which somebody can click on or copy the link. There is already a standard of saying a has (#) is a permalink in blogs. The blog and wiki software should just auto-insert these after each paragraph.

So, one more thing for my todo list is open up my typo install and add permalink purple hashes for each paragraph. Ah if there were only more time in the day.

The other issue, is i want my blog to have some wiki tech. Or rather a past filter which goes to my personal wiki. I’ve got a ton of wiki’s some of which i’ve maintained, some i don’t. Each has it’s own syntax: twiki, purplewiki, mediawiki, bamboo, etc…