Most of the useful or interesting articles I’ve been reading over the last week (and even before then) have come to me via Dave Winer’s Scripting News and John Rhodes’ Webword newsletter.
Both of these sources are aggregation services: they gather together high quality links and references into a handy digest. Most of the time, they concern themselves with technical matters (software programming and usability), but their authors always include other information where they find it interesting or pertinent. Over the last week, most of their focus has been on the attacks in the US, and on the world’s response.
On another note, I really need to do more work on the blogging tools for Sunpig. Yesterday evening Abi lost a bunch of stuff she’d been typing in because she pressed the backspace key when the focus was outside of the editing text box. This was the equivalent of pressing the browser “back” button, and suddenly all her text was gone.
I’m thinking about adding a “hold” and “released” status (radio buttons) to the editing. With the status set to Hold, you could click Save, and your text would be saved to the databasem but not displayed on the main web log page. You’d have to explicitly release the text before it was published. Updates to existing stuff would be similar: with the status set to Hold, you could update your stuff, and save changes to the DB, but not publish them until you’re ready.
The alternative it to create a scratchpad area, like they have on E2. Both options would allow me to put in a “preview” feature as well.