Glacial Erratics

Purple Spreading

May 29, 2004

Jonas M Luster has once again suggested PurpleNumbers as a good aid for doing proper blog sourcing. His posting prompts me to put down some thoughts I've apparently forgotten to record in the past.    (7NP)

Jonas mentions some methods for purpling blog postings:    (7NQ)

There's also EugeneEricKim's plugin for Blosxom.    (7NW)

One large difference between the plugins that Eugene and I use and other systems is that ours use the PurpleWiki libraries to create unique identifiers for each chunk of content. This allows TransClusion of content among blog entries and with associated Wiki pages. Follow the TransClusion link to see this in action or visit PlaNetwork:InternetRelayChat to learn how it is being used with an IRC channel associated with next week's Planetwork conference. In that setup purple numbered content from the wiki and irc logs can be transcluded back into the live IRC chat. That system is using another PurpleWiki related tool: Perplog.    (7NX)

The long term goal of TransClusion in PurpleWiki is to enable to direct granular quotation of content anywhere on the web, making citation sort of automatic. I have a working prototype of TransClusion amongst geographically disperse servers, but the current solution doesn't scale so there's more work to be done.    (7NY)

Another way to purple HTML content is with some Javascript to process the Dom of a page when it is loaded. There's probably a way to automate this, but if you have a page that you would like to quickly purple make these changes to the header:    (7NZ)

   <head>
    <script language='javascript' src='ator.js'></script>
  </head>
  <body onLoad="purp(window.document.getElementsByTagName?('body')[0])">    (7O0)

and in a nearby file (that I've called ator.js) put this:    (7O1)

  var tagsRE=/\bh|p|li|dt|dd|pre\b/i; 
  var nid = 0;
  var purpleStyle = "font-family:sans-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:x-small;text-decoration:none;color:#C8A8FF"
  function purp(node){
      if (node.hasChildNodes?) {
        var hi_cn;
        for(hi_cn=0; hi_cn<node.childNodes.length; hi_cn++) {
            purp(node.childNodes[hi_cn]);
        }
      }
    if(node.nodeType == 1) {
        if (tagsRE.test(node.nodeName)) {
            var nidValue = "nid" + nid;
            node.setAttribute('id', nidValue);
            newNode = document.createElement('a');
            newNode.setAttribute('href', "#" + nidValue);
            newNode.setAttribute('style', purpleStyle);
            newNode.innerHTML = " " + nid;
            node.appendChild(newNode);
            nid = nid + 1;
        }
      }
    }    (7O2)

I originally posted this in a message to the BlueOxenCollaboratory. The code is adapted from PaulFord?'s The Passivator which itself is adapted from something else. Such is the way of the Internet and it is good.    (7O3)

Sending...