Glacial Erratics

This evening I spent some time with MovableType and PurpleWiki to get PurpleWiki parsing working in blogs comments instead of just entries. This enables a few features in comments:    (0000MJ)

• PurpleNumbers    (0000MK)
• WikiWord parsing    (0000ML)
• WikiFormatting possibilities, such as headers, lists, italics, bold    (0000MM)

Because of the way MovableType is set up, all comments get the same text formatting options, so PurpleWiki for comments is either on or off. It's on now. For those of you who don't care, just keep on as before; there shouldn't be any disasters. Give it a try.    (0000MN)

A project for this month is to merge the several disparate branches of PurpleWiki development into a new release and in the process:    (0000MO)

• Create a technical specification so that other tools can implement purple numbering features.    (0000MP)
• Create a roadmap for future developments.    (0000MQ)
• Write a Why Is PurpleWiki Cool evangelical sermon of sorts that spreads the good word and acts as a tutorial.    (0000MR)
• Address some usability issues that come about from conflicts that occur when optimizing for the internal (invisible) and external (visible) representations of the PurpleNumber.    (0000MS)

There are some more thoughts about this stuff at PurpleWikiScratchpad.    (0000MT)

A primary goal is to get this stuff more out there and for that I could do with help and advice from anyone who happens to be reading this. If you are familiar with PurpleNumbers and have some comments about them, please leave them here. If you see them, but just don't get it, let me know, as that's valuable too. If you have suggestions on how to build some bridges with other developers to integrate Purple ideas into their tools, that would be good too.    (0000MU)

What's lacking is a salient bit o' info that captures what makes these little purple things helpful. Thus far people either get it quickly or don't get it, and that's not good enough.    (0000MV)