Bill Powell Is Alive [The Den]
{ Three Acres and a Penguin }

Do you ever think of places on the Internet as places? I never thought about it much before, but if this is my "home" site, where's the den?

Like everyone else on the Internet, I'm still trying to figure out at least a little of what we're all doing here. I enjoy having my own little site, but I'd be hard pressed to summarize the thing for you. Every so often, I get frustrated with my current structure, rip it apart, gather up the broken pages, clean them up, bind them to their own lost links out in hyperspace, and try something new.

Blog: Feed the Monster

Until recently, I thought of this place as a blog. For many years, I attempted to keep a blog, but a blog is all about quick posts that must be deep frozen in their particular bracket of the space-time continuum, preferably sized to the minute. You aren't even supposed to edit them, really, without using delete tags. Nor are you encouraged to add second or third thoughts--why would you? On the off chance that someone will wander through your archives, rereading old blogs for old times' sake?

Sure, decent software bubbles updated blogs to the top, but readers still have to scroll through your old stuff, and by the time you're scrolling through a blog, you're violating the medium.

In short, a blog really is a 'blog--a web log. A log. You do not playfully tweak a ship's log. You do not go back and revise the CHANGELOG if you think Version 0.05 got insufficient attention. You work on the current version.

Logs make perfect sense for certain projects, like sailing a ship. But I'm not sure they work for me here.

• Time is the focus. You haven't updated your blog!
• Which, looked at backwards, means: If there's nothing new, the old stuff is boring/outdated/consumed.

I'm not the first person to notice that this dynamic easily leads to frequent posts that consist of nothing but keyword-laden links to similar keyword-laden links. C. S. Lewis could easily base a rewrite of The Great Divorce in such a hell.

Not that I mean to trash a good blog. If it works for you, great.

Wiki: Group thought

In stark contrast to the blog stands the wiki. The wiki is concept-centered. You don't link to /2003/03/8/35/59/52/elephants, you link to /elephants. If you have a second thought, you edit the wiki. No one cares.

After years of blogging, discovering the wiki was a draught of champagne. I wandered around the original wiki, and kept thinking, They can start a page about whatever they want. It doesn't have to go into a category. And you can link to it without remembering the exact day you started it. And you're encouraged to edit it whenever you want.

I suppose I could call this den a "personal wiki", but I'd rather not. An essential aspect of the wiki seems to be the group effort. Anyone can edit anything. The more you think about that, the more amazing it gets--until you start reading about, say, the medieval intellectual world, not to mention most tribal cultures. Then we're the ones that start to look odd. Anyhow, odd or not, since I'm the one writing all this, wiki doesn't seem quite right.

The Den: No Pressure

I'm also happy to call this a den because it reminds me that I've finally moved all this away from my front door, and I can relax a bit. Although I've had a separate professional site for years, this is still my main email address, and I still expect editors and other formal visits from time to time. From the beginning, I've had a not-so-creative tension about this place: can I relax and just talk, or need everything need be polished and publishable? The result can be a bit tense and cheery and didactic, like a permanent phone call with a new client.

Yes, life is too short for any of us to be slovenly. But it's also too short to agonize and polish and repolish a piece that's meant more as a conversation. One could argue that we'd both be better off if I shut up and we went to our separate copies of Shakespeare, but if there is a value in this ephemeral sort of conversation, and I think there is, one has to feel free to chat and be done with it, even if one is also labouring mightily to craft more permanent work. We writers don't fret over our face-to-face conversations that aren't worth publishing.

Since I'm not trying to sell anything (except my own books, I suppose), nor hijack the blogosphere, I would like you and me to understand that this is my den, it's where I hang out and shuffle papers and thumb through books and talk to a friend. It's not a chat room or forum, of course, since it's usually just me, but on the other hand, the online journal or diary metaphor doesn't make much sense either. I'm not alone, I'm talking to you, and hoping you'll talk back.

Besides, I do have a journal, and I don't have any intention of tossing it into the Internet. Online journals actually rather frighten me. This is the Internet--everything is in public. I've moved this den away from the front door, but it's not hidden, merely discreet.

Anyhow, there's a long explanation of a short word. Welcome.

An overview of Markdown syntax, refactored from http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html.

Markdown is a minimal syntax set, designed to make it easy to write and edit your prose. You can use HTML tags whenever you need to.

Markdown syntax cannot be used within block-level HTML.

Span-level HTML tags -- e.g. <span>, <cite>, or <del> -- can be used anywhere in a Markdown paragraph, list item, or header.

Overview

To get:	Type:
<	<
&	&
paragraph break	one or more blank lines
br	two spaces at end of line
H1 (underlined style)	Your header 1 ================
H2 (underlined style)	Your header 2 ----------------
H1 (atx style)	#Your header 1
H2	##Your header 2
Continue down to H6	######Your header 6
Blockquotes	> First level of quote > > Second level; a quote-within-a-quote
Unordered List	* Item 1 + Item 2 - Item 3 + Whatever.
Ordered List	1. Item 1 2. Item 2 47. Item 3 still works.
hr	*** or +++ or --- or * * * or any combination, on their own line
link (inline)	[the link](http://thelink.com "Optional Title")
link (reference)	link: [the link][id] definition: [the link][id] [id]: http://thelink.com "Optional Title" Multiple forms: see below.
images	Same as links (inline or reference), except with ! before text, e.g.: 
links (automatic)	<http://example.com/> <email-address@example.com>
em	*em* or _em_
strong	**strong** or __strong__
code	`code` or ``code``

More examples

> This is a blockquote with one paragraph. Each line begins
> with an arrow.

> Another blockquote, but only one arrow at the beginning.
Don't actually need more.

> This is the first level of quoting.
>
> > This is a nested blockquote.
> 
> Back to the first level.

* An unordered list
+ With mismatching bullets
- Still works

1. An ordered list
23. Just needs to begin with 1.

This is [an example](http://example.com/ "Title") inline link.
[This link](http://example.net/) has no title attribute.
See my [About](/about/) page for a relative path.

[An example][id] reference-style link.
[An example] [id] reference-style link with a space.
[An example][] reference-style link, with an implied id of "An example".

Reference links require link definitions, which can take several forms:

[id]: http://example.com/  "Optional Title Here"
[id]: http://example.com/  'Optional Title Here'
[id]: http://example.com/  (Optional Title Here)
[id]: <http://example.com/>  "Optional Title Here"
[id]: http://example.com/longish/path/to/resource/here
    "Optional Title Here"

Reference links are case-insensitive.

Image links:

![Alt text, inline](/path/to/img.jpg)
![Alt text, inline](/path/to/img.jpg "Optional title")

![Alt text, reference-style][id]
[id]: url/to/image  "Optional title attribute"

Additional notes

Lists

Separate list items with blank lines if you want each item to be enclosed in a <p> tag.

List items may consist of multiple paragraphs. Each subsequent paragraph in a list item must be indented by either 4 spaces or one tab.

To avoid an accidental list by a number at the start of a line, you can backslash-escape the period:

1986\. What a great season.

Blockquotes

A Markdown "indent" is 4 spaces or one tab.

To put a blockquote within a list item, the blockquote's > delimiters need to be indented.

Code blocks

To produce a code block in Markdown, simply indent every line of the block by at least 4 spaces or 1 tab.

To put a code block within a list item, the code block needs to be indented twice -- 8 spaces or two tabs.

Special characters

Use a backslash to escape:

    \   backslash
    `   backtick
    *   asterisk
    _   underscore
    {}  curly braces
    []  square brackets
    ()  parentheses
    #   hash mark
    +   plus sign
    -   minus sign (hyphen)
    .   dot
    !   exclamation mark

You'll also want to read the original, full Markdown syntax here.

On this site, I'm actually using pymarkdown, a pyblosxom plugin.

Here's another python implementation of Markdown. This is exciting because you can use extensions.

You can convert Markdown to formats besides HTML with other programs. Like Pandoc.

Pandoc is a Haskell library for converting from one markup format to another, and a command-line tool that uses this library. It can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, RTF, DocBook XML, groff man, and S5 HTML slide shows.

I haven't tried Pandoc yet, but since I went to the trouble to install Haskell to get it working, I thought I'd mention it. :)

• What's a den? What is this place?
• Where do I post my comment?
• Where's the site map?
• Hey! That old post isn't under the same date/tag anymore!
• Full FAQ

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