My helpful screenshot

Several times I’ve started a blog and been unsatisfied with the results. Or rather, I want something more than a blog, more than recording moments.

I want a place to record things I learn, for two reasons - for later reference by me, and because sometimes what I learn is also useful to others. I’ve been using blogging software because that’s what was at hand -first Wordpress and then Jekyll. But Jekyll’s not what I want either. Perhaps I need to write something.

I like the idea of Jekyll letting me just write in text, with a little markup. I want more control than Jekyll gives, because I want more control than what HTML5 gives. And that’s one challenge, because unless I go far off the beaten path, whatever I make needs to be accessed through a web browser.

I want to gather and present large amounts of information. Half book, half magazine, half blog, half notebook. Search is important. But so are graphics, and I mean diagrams, not just photos for color or art purposes.

So

  • bend Drupal to the task, or Django, or Turbogears, etc
  • microframework like Bottle or Flask
  • write my own
  • maybe something using WebGL instead of HTML?

I think something in C++ would be interesting. So few web frameworks in C++, I just see

I remember reading about something else recently, too.

The main issue, now that I’m looking at web frameworks, is that none of them is what I want. I don’t want to pump out huge amounts of content written by many people. I want something better than a Wiki but a little more dynamic than a book.

And this is a huge distraction from what I really want to be doing. This has the echo of Knuth spending ten years writing TeX because he wanted a better way to publish math-heavy books.