Common Craft Blog
Purple Numbers
By leelefever on February 18, 2005 - 1:29pm
Last night I got a chance to hang out with a majority of the folks from SocialText at Nancy White's House. Among other things, I learned about a resource by Chris Dent called Purple Numbers that I'd never heard about before.
In my words, it takes blog-style permalinks to the granular level. Using Purple Numbers, you can have permalinks to a specific paragraph of a weblog entry as opposed to one link for the whole thing. For instance, I can link you to a paragraph where Chris describes the original intent of Purple Numbers(The page scrolls to show the linked paragraph at the top- you can also see more Purple Numbers on Chris' blog).
I'm just starting to learn about it, but it seems to have a lot of potential.
Purple Numbers
Is this the same as purple slurple
http://www.purpleslurple.net/
I find this tool very handy.
Purple Numbers
I think SlurplePurple is something that enables Purple Numbers- like converts a page to using Purple Numbers. I'm not sure about that though.
Purple Numbers
PurpleSlurple takes andexisting web page and runs it through a proxy to add purple numbers to the headers, paragraphs and list items in the page. It works great for static pages. Matthew Schneider, the author did some excellent work.
Where PurpleSlurple does not work is with pages that may change, such as wikis and blog postings. Purple Numbers, in their ideal implementation, don't leave their original paragraph even if that paragraph moves on the page, between pages or even between servers. In PurpleSlurple, the numbers move around as new content is added to the beginning or middle of the content.
Some, but not all, of the ideal functionality has been present in PurpleWiki
http://purplewiki.blueoxen.net/
(which is used as the backend processor for my purple numbered blog postings) for more than two years.
Lee, around about the time we met I was just finishing up a plugin for Kwiki that does purple numbering. It's not quite soup yet, but there's a demo site here
http://www.burningchrome.com/pwiki/
The good thing about the Kwiki version compared to the PurpleWiki version is that once it is released it will be _extremely_ easy to install (compared to PurpleWiki).
I don't think there's a Kwiki plugin for movable type yet, though. Given endless time I could work on that too.
The long term goals of the church of purple bear a lot of similarity with Ted Nelson's Xanadu project: granular addressability, transclusion, permanent identifiers for microcontent, a culture of reuse and refactoring.