BigDinosaur forum plans—why is this here, anyway?

meta
1

The overall purpose of this forum is for me to have fun playing with Discourse. However, there are three primary things that I will almost certainly end up doing with it as Discourse gets away from alpha-with-multiple-daily-github-updates and more toward stable release software:

  1. I would like to ditch Disqus for comments on my blog, since Disqus is pretty fast and loose with tracking user behavior;

  2. I wouldn’t mind doing the same with my wife’s blog, which she may or may not start updating again;

  3. As more of a long-term item, I’d very much like to pull all the discussion from the Chronicles of George boards over here. Vanilla is working fine, and I’m more than satisfied by its speed and by the admin experience of it, but I’m excited by the changes that Discourse brings to the table and I’d love to actually put it into production—once it matures.

In the meanwhile, this place is essentially a rule-free crazy town. The more users using it, the happier I’ll be, since I’m interested in real-world performance and usage info on Discourse.

###Updates & downtime:
I do git pulls at least once a day, so if you happen to be posting when I do an update, you’ll likely see some weirdness. If you run into an odd problem or error, wait about five minutes and shift-refresh the site, and whatever was broken will almost certainly be un-broken.

###Styling disasters
You might also occasionally see nothing except a giant CSS error; this happens when I’m screwing with the styling and accidentally leave out a semicolon or something. Discourse currently doesn’t fail in a very friendly fashion if it can’t parse its stylesheets. Again, wait a few minutes & refresh and things out to be better.

###This sucks, you suck, blah blah
Feedback is welcome! The meta category is the place to talk about the site. Place your sucks there.

2

I like playing with software. Having hardware floating around to test things is one of the (few) things I miss about living in the IT world. While I was in Massachusetts for a tedious month, I got an account on sdf.org and started playing around, rediscovering the joys of mouse-less computing.

Longer term, I’m thinking about setting up a text-mode-only Citadel system again with a VHF packet radio interface. Because radio.

3

You are so hardcore. Would a VHF packet radio interface let you whistle at the computer like we used to do in the BBS days when we were trying to crash someone’s board??

4

A good question. I don’t know enough to answer it, but I bet you could really muck about with it. So much in radio is now done in software that there are all sorts of potential new ways to screw with stuff.

6

I cribbed a lot from BoingBoing. I’m a sucker for slab-serif typefaces, though it looks a hell of a lot better under OS X than Windows (which is true for all typography—after using OS X for a few years, going back to the way Windows renders fonts is just painful).