Something that ‘people in San Francisco’ seem to do, that no-one back home in London was doing (or if they were, they kept quiet about it) is maintain a personal wiki. I’ve avoided it for ages, mostly because I figured that if I have this much trouble maintaining a blog, surely a wiki will just make my cluster of unmaintained pages even larger.

The previous entry on microblogging was the start of a realisation. Realising that Pownce is useful in its capacity as a microblogging platform rather than as an alternative to Twitter, I think that my personal publishing breaks down cleanly into tiers, based on the depth of the content. And a wiki is perhaps the most natural part of that as anything.

Blogging, as in a site like this, is really only well suited to a certain style of publishing. I want to publish content of a consistent style on this blog. I want there to be a certain amount of depth to each entry, and I don’t want some detailed attempt all about the philosophy of personal publishing to be punctuated by a single line piece stating that ‘I could really murder a chip butty right now’.

The way I see this breaking down, and this is starting to feel quite natural, is as follows:

• Pownce is for short things. Thoughts, spontaneous musings, links that you think are remarkable (which contrasts with Delicious, which is a store of links I think are useful in some way). It suits short, sharp content. No room for depth. That’s microblogging.
• This blog contains longer, more considered content. I feel reasonably sure that the things I write here are somehow valuable, either as information or as an expression of my self. They have some depth. Comments are on. I should track responses on other blogs, too. Whilst communicating via separate blogs is a lamentably lost ideal of the original, pre-comments design of blogging, it’s a concept I like. In aiming to write content of substance, I’d want to support it.

The critical thing with a blog though, and something that should be embraced, is time sensitivity. What I write here is timestamped and could, upon further reflection in a month or a year prove to be dismissible rambling bullshit. But the timestamp validates that. The moment you read this you know that it’s old and that gives you the context to consume it. You can write safe in the knowledge that time will let your obsolete content fade away. Timeless, accidental masterpieces will look after themselves.

Which leads to wikis. A wiki will contain detailed content. Thoughts, projects, entire subjects documented through the eyes of an author. Wikis have long been complemented for being very close to the original ideals of the read/write web that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned (back before no-one had bothered to implemented the necessary HTTP verbs to do it). It’s back to a world of writing standalone pages. And in standalone, I mean to imply timeless. So, my ‘about me’ page isn’t a blog entry, it’s a page, and wiki is a superior publishing medium to maintain that kind of content. Similarly, documenting my ‘thoughts on personal publishing’, and my ‘current publishing practices’ is a standalone, timeless (and constantly updated) piece of information. Here I blog about how I publish, or rather, how I’m considering doing it. It’s driven by a desire for discussion. However, to publish my current publishing behaviour, a wiki is a superior platform. That one URL (let’s say, perhaps, http://ben-ward.co.uk/content/Publishing) will always represent current information and is far preferable over regular blog entries every time I change something. ‘Publishing Patterns, August 2008’, ‘Publishing Patterns, November 2008’… a blog is less suitable for versioned content.

So, Twitter is a slight oddball

I regard it as publishing ‘fragments’ of my day. By my reckoning it fits into the tier below (smaller than) ‘microblogging’. But it grew out from encouraging people to just publish their status and into its own social network. So as well as containing the little snippets of my day, it also contains pieces of social interaction. Twitter is great, but it’s a less pure publishing platform.

Combination. The lifestream.

The thing about blogging — an issue that produced some background resistance in me to the personal wiki concept — is that whilst you can better maintain content, you’re unable to push it to people. A blog has a feed and people consume that feed and therefore people read what you have to say. Sound vain? Get over that and accept that in some capacity we all want people to read what we write and we don’t want our output buried somewhere it’ll never be found.

If I were to produce a nicely combined life stream (which I will), Pownce, Twitter and the blog are chronological and so slot in neatly. Twitter gets filtered to avoid publishing those ‘social interaction’ posts, but otherwise fits in. But since wiki content is not time sensitive, it is not the content itself but the edits of that content which should be streamed. That in itself is a bit problematic. New pages are probably noteworthy, major edits are probably noteworthy; minor edits not so much.

The scenario I’m trying to support is this: Rather than someone come to this site and subscribe to just the blog feed, they would subscribe to the whole lifestream. But, the lifestream would be built such that the content is relevant enough they don’t get irritated by its content. Not an easy balance. Configuration seems like a grossly over-complex solution, but perhaps offering two predefined options would be manageable; substantial content containing blog entries, major wiki edits, and longer Pownce posts could be available separately from the whole life stream.

I suppose I should build it.

When Firefox was released, tabbed browsing suddenly became the new essential feature in web browsers. Internet Explorer was belittled for its old school multi-window interface and tabs were pimped as the greatest thing since sliced bread (toasted and generously smothered in butter).

The curious thing about this is that really, tabs suck. They always existed as a simple hack around the operating system’s (Windows) inability to handle many windows together. The taskbar got full too easily, and when 75% of the items were browser windows, it all became unmanageable. As a result, tabs went into every browser on every platform, effectively providing a second, browser-context-specific taskbar.

The problem now (and likely then as well) is that the idea of one single ‘browser context’ is bogus. Browsers are now used for such a variety of tasks and applications that it makes less sense to keep, for example, Gmail and Google Calendar in the same context as a set of blogs you might be reading. Your cycle of looking at those pages is different. Mail more regularly than Calendar, and the blogs might just be a reading list to refer to later. Whilst browsers were very quick to add tabs as a feature, non of them have worked them into the idea of working contexts. New items always open in your last used window. Even if you manually break Gmail out into its own window, the moment you open a link you’re putting a reading list of pages into your email context. Tabs are implemented in a physical, window based manner, rather than in a workflow based manner.

On Mac OSX specifically, there’s an addition problem (actually, physical). The otherwise quite-useful Exposé function doesn’t work with tabs in any application. So whilst in Pages, Fireworks, Preview and so on I could hit F10 and see all my documents together, the tabbed browser hides all the content away behind tabs.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to a point. I’ve turned off tabbed browsing. Switched back to the old way of having each document or application in a separate window. Switching between then with Cmd+` rather than Cmd+Shift+], gaining the ability to see them visually with a swift tap of F10, and losing the recurring bug of thinking I’m finished with all the documents in one manually created context window, only to find the music stops when I accidentally close Last.FM.

To defy my muscle memory for hitting Cmd+T, I’ve used Mac OSX’s excellent Keyboard preferences to override ‘New Window’ to Cmd+T, and New Tab to Cmd+Option+T.

It’s just an experiment. Sometimes you do want tabs to keep things under control, for example working through a feed reader, opening links for reference later creates a single ‘reading list’ task, and you wouldn’t want dozens of those individual pages cluttering up the rest of the desktop. There will always be exceptions. But since the browser software has failed to handle work contexts properly, I think reversing the default behaviour is the way to go.

Initial reactions are that this is easier to manage, results in less accidents and no accidents in losing windows (Safari has a ‘Reopen last closed window’ option, but is less graceful with tabs).

Note, this problem with tabs is just a result of needing to break web applications and documents out of the browser context. Efforts like Fluid (a WebKit based browser that creates standalone executables for specific websites) also help break out these contexts for apps you use regularly, but is less suitable for infrequent or new apps. Also, this is not to say that all tabs are broken. Tabs in IM apps like Adium still work me, because the amount of content open at one time is fairly small, and managing two work contexts (‘Work Conversations’ and ‘Personal Conversations’) within a single window interface is trivial. The web browser falls down because the amount of content and the number of contexts now exceeds what I can manage.

We could build better browsers, but it strikes me that the better first action is to step back and stop bypassing the capabilities of the host operating system.