It's been a good bit of debugging, and I've learned a lot! So far, I've discovered a lot about regular expressions (don't fear the geekery) because IE can't handle XML very well, which means switching my nice tidy XML responses from the server back into plain text for the AJAX to play with. Quite a variety of search-and-replacing came into play, especially to get rid of the white space (carriage returns and the like--carriage returns will be an upcoming blog: since when did anything return, and what's a carriage?) that appears here and there in web pages. In short, the XML tools led to nice elegant solutions, but the incomplete implementation of XML tools require icky moving back and forth between XML and plain text.

So I'm thinking about this thing that I've put on my lap, and seeing many different directions to go with it

Drupal-centric approach

On one hand, I see a route of learning a lot more about Drupal and integrating margin comments into Drupal's comment structure. At this point, I don't know if that is even possible (but I'm guessing it is somehow). I like that for openning it up to things like co-comments, track-backs, and more.

It's time for a conscious effort to make my blog more lively and frequently-posted-to. It seems like there's a little bit of that going around, and I don't want to end up losing the thoughts going on over the summer. That's meaning number 1 of 're-mediating the blog'

I've been reading "Tools for Thought" by Howard Rheingold lately. It's been great fun for focused intellectual history, and set me into a mood of making many connections. One of the big ones was, happily enough, to a television program that, now that I think about it, had a profound impact on me during my teenage years, "Connections", the documentary series by James Burke on intellectual, technological, and scientific history.

In particular, there is discussion early in "Tools for Thought" about symbolic logic. The really fun part was that I was taking margin-notes, especially using "cf." in the margin to make a note of comparison. "cf." has always struck me as one of the most powerful margin-note tools because it makes a darn good guess at finding a hidden, sneaky, and delightful connection (!) between ideas, but one that needs to be worked out much more than the margin can handle, as Fermat knew only too well!

When I taught first-year composition, I always concentrated a lot on the good reading habits that go along with good writing habits, and making use of the margin to make cf.'s was at the top of the list. It see it as giving students a little free space to make a good guess, play with an insight, and come back to it to tease it out and see if it walks.