GIDNetwork™ and the Blogs

Hehehe, it sounds like the title to a bad monster movie.

I really like this system as it has been developed (and developing) to give people a cool place to speak their mind. Granted, there may be those of you out there that think I should keep mine a bit more under control, but I listen not to the nay-sayers. I look forward to being here as this system matures. Hopefully it will become a good source for others to find information, or just read for the fun of reading. I do have some points to make about GIDNetwork™ that will hopefully find their way into future versions.

The ability to edit created articles

I don't know exactly how this would be handled to maintain the original posting. It does seem you would not want to be mucking around with major changes since once they get published, they do tend to show up in a Google SERP. What I would like to be able to do though, is add links as relevant articles are added. Maybe this will make this a bit clearer.

I have an article I am working on that comfortably can be broken into a fair (12 at current count) number of "chapters" or "parts". While I have some of the pages at least in part complete, I will not have them all for some time. I broke my first article in the series down into,

• What I wish to accomplish

• A list that will serve as a TOC and link to chapters

• General information that may be helpful to the reader

What would be GREAT would being able to setup some "tentative links". That way, I could link to the pages I have partially written (but not yet published) and have them come up in a coherent fashion. As it stands, I would need to publish the content pages THEN publish the start article so I have a link to, well, link to. It is my belief that this would help with navigation between related pages once the article count here starts to climb. If the link from the TOC is not published yet a "pending publication" page (or something similar) could be shown to the reader. Perhaps even a percentage completed field for the saved drafts could be taken into account. I don't really want to be able to remove content. As I mentioned, Google seems to "see" what is here quite well. No sense in mucking with the works there.

Perhaps editing of content could be with an add on "Ed.note" box or something similar for errata or changes that effect the content.

A Code / Content Repository

This may be a pipe dream but it would be hugely helpful to be able to store code online here that could be linked to in the body of an article. Don't get me wrong, I like to read code, but it can get overwelming to the flow of an article. I am trying to break the code into digestible chunks for my current articles for that very reason. The problem with that is, the code will be in various places and will have to be reconstructed by someone wishing to use it. This, while not terrible, could be a source of problems for people new to whatever the article is discussing. Being able to link to the code and show just a snip with the "more..." link would be a very nice way to improve the look of the published article itself.

The best situation would be to have a private repo and a public repo for a Member. That way, they could work up the code and then move it to the publicly accesable area. Think of it like a drafts section for code. To be super cool it could be done with Subversion or CVS. We might then have the start of a developer network here. I know there is an awful lot of creative, knowledgeable people here. Maybe this would help to get more code submissions. The code subforums could be rolled into this system and users of the Forums could then get an updateable 'module' based on their interests.

A Spellchecking System

Gahhh, I am awful with my spelling sometimes. I find myself taking a post, putting it in a gmail reply, using the spellchecker on it, and then copying it back when I am so driven. It is a hassle and would be really great if this could be done right here, from this editor I am currently using.

Any thoughts, flames or semi-coherent grunts would be appreciated.

Mark