I have a distant cousin named Albert Vanderburg. Online, at least, he goes by the name "Panther". We've never met, although we have exchanged email from time to time. Albert is, shall we say, an "outlier". (I don't think he would argue with that assessment.)

Panther lives in Hawaii, and is homeless. Nevertheless, he has maintained a blog since October 8, 1997. That's a pretty early entry into blogspace! (Dave Winer, who claims to be one of the earliest -- although I don't know how to judge the accuracy of that claim -- started on April 1, 1997.)

People are forwarding an email around the Internet, laughing about it. A lady hit "reply" when she meant to hit "forward," and wrote some rather unpleasant things to the wrong person. I find it hard to laugh, because I've made similar mistakes, and the only thing that saved me is that I happened to make those mistakes with innocuous messages.

Granted, in this case the lady reveals a particularly ugly side of herself. But one big lesson to be learned is that convenience comes with a price. Every time we make something easy, we also make certain kinds of mistakes much easier than they were before. In the days of writing letters, we had to write the name on the envelope ourselves, look up the address and write it, etc., even if we were replying directly to a letter we'd received. It was still possible to put two letters in the wrong envelopes, but it wasn't nearly as easy as it is today, when we can just click "reply" or "reply all" or "forward" and away it goes.

The next time someone shows you a dramatic new convenience, take time to think about what new kinds of mistakes you'll be making soon.

I'd like my entire blog to be self-contained. That is to say, I'd like to be able to move it to a different URL someday, if necessary, and have everything still work. (Permalinks that others had saved wouldn't work, but that can't be helped in this case.)

Right now I don't see a way to link to another blog entry without including the full URL, like this. It would be nice if blosxom supported a special tag for this, or at least applied the $url template variable to the body of the entry. (Of course, then it would need to provide an easy way to escape dollar signs in entries, so perhaps the special tag would be best.

Here's another idea for Blapp. Not often, but occasionally, blog ideas occur to me faster than I can write them. Right now I'm recording the ideas in a sticky until I get time to write a proper blog entry, but it would be nice if Blapp would maintain a little list for me to dribble those half-baked thoughts into.

I suppose it's a litte ungrateful to say this two days after category support arrived in version 5 of Blosxom (or whatever it really is in Rael's strange version numbering system). But it's still true ... you should be able to put Blosxom entries in multiple categories. Here's a great example: this entry could reasonably fit into several other categories (Computers/Internet/Blogging because it deals with Blapp, Computers/SoftwareDevelopment/Methodologies because it deals with bazaar-style development, Computers/SoftwareDevelopment/Tools because it deals with GUI builders, Computers/SoftwareDevelopment/Interfaces because it deals with inherent problems of GUI development ... you get the idea).

I understand the need to have a primary category, but secondary categories wouldn't have to reflect the disk storage model.

James has a real point about Blosxom's date management. It's true that the date attached to a blog entry should be a "publication date" rather than the "authoring date" (O'Reilly's weblog system gets this wrong). But once published the date shouldn't change. I do sometimes edit entries after publication, to correct spelling or other minor mistakes. But I don't want the publication date to change.

An additional problem is that blosxom's permalinks are based on date. If the publication date can change, those links aren't so perma, are they?

Linking is a pain in Blosxom, but I dont' think it's Blosxom's fault. I do, however, wish tools like Blapp would provide some assistance. (That's not fair ... it already does provide assistance, in the form of good drag-and-drop support. I should say I wish it would provide a particular kind of assistance.)

I'm offline a lot, so there are many times when the drag-and-drop doesn't help much. Plus, my blog entries about particular topics tend to cluster together around particular points in time.

So I'd like Blapp to parse the HTML I write and remember a list of "recent links" that I've used. The first time I link to a particular page, I would have to do it manually, or drag it in. But after that, Blapp could just present me with a list of recent links and let me choose one.

There are a lot of possible refinements ... perhaps restricting the list (or sorting it) to prefer links that I've used in the current category, or something like that.

I learned about blosxom from James, and it sounded like just the thing for a personal blog. I've played with Movable Type, but had nearly the same problem James did -- if I'm going to blog easily, I need to be able to do it without net access. Then I learned about Blapp, and that was it. So here's my blog. Maybe it'll be interesting someday.