From: Eric Wong <normalperson@...>
Date: 2011-09-07T14:02:52+09:00
Subject: Re: posts on Unix systems programming

Brian Candler <b.candler@pobox.com> wrote:
> Eric Wong wrote in post #1020497:
> > Is there anybody who would NOT want these posts in ruby-talk?
> 
> Yes, me. A mailing list is for discussion (ruby *talk*), and apart from 
> occasional announcements, I don't think it is for broadcast content. In 
> my opinion, if everyone decided to mirror their personal blog onto 
> ruby-talk then it would make ruby-talk useless; and although what you're 
> doing sounds great, I don't think it is any more exceptional than many 
> other series of blog postings on ruby-related matters.

Fair enough, I can do a dedicated mailing list which people can opt
into.

> So I would rather see it in something like a github wiki. Then it's easy 
> to link to, and it can also be easily updated and maintained going 
> forwards. Of course, feel free to post an announcement here with the 
> URL.

I don't like using web browsers at all.  I'm certainly never going to
rely on or endorse any commercial hosting sites, either.

> > Most people would start a blog/wiki, but I dislike dealing with _any_
> > browsers/formatting/layout/presentation, so absolutely no
> > markup/markdown/troff/textile if I'm to do this.

<snip>

> exported to PDF etc (google for "pandoc" for my favoured tool). It's so 
> worth taking 5 minutes to do this. (And I agree with you that life's too 
> short to do textile, troff, latex etc; focus on the content)

I already use Markdown and pandoc for other projects and expect my
emails to be reasonably close to Markdown.

However, I don't ever want to open a web browser (or any GUI) to verify
things look right for GUI users.  Somebody else can format it better
than I'm willing to.  They can also freely endorse/use commercial
hosting sites if they want.

-- 
Eric Wong