Posted before, but now with “Structured Blogging”

Well an extension would be the best term – I absolute LOVE the plugin, and is perfectly suited for a review site, I’m currently providing feedback and hoping that some of it is taken on board. Their response has been more than pleasent and they’ve already suggested a new release is in the works. Wonder how it will manage being upgraded.

It has a lot of potential. I;m trying to get to understand how to chagne a few things, and at the moment it doesn’t support multipages – which is quite important for me as I write extended reviews.

Btw, I haven’t read Running with Scissors yet, but it’s been sitting my shelf for about a year or so and I will get around to it. It seems a pretty good book – just got another 60 or so to get through…

I am afraid I can’t endorse this plugin.

Yes – the basic idea is a great one. The implementation is not so good.

Basically it is inflexible. I have to use the format/layout that the StricturedBlogging team sets out; it is NOT always possible to customize.

Not all elements at all levels are classed, therefore they cannot easily be CSS styled. Styles defined by tag context are POSSIBLE where class names have been left out, but its a right pain in the ass – and usually means that inherited style elements have to be REdefined for tags inside these structures.

Microposts don’t apparently work with some common tags (try putting an intro blurb, and then a MORE tag in a movie review).

Microposts can not be composited or embedded: I can’t write up an “infobox” for a movie, and then import it into a post about the actor, a post about the director later, and embedd it in ANOTHER Micropost which is the movie review. They cannot be embedded because of the decision to TOTALLY make them a seperate type of post with their own editor, and they cannot be composited because that support hasn’t been written in.

I LOVE the idea of a semantically described, XML structure for some common types of information (books, movies, people, events, etc.), which make better sense to software agents, and can be easily styled through CSS to make them presentable and useful for human readers as well.

Unfortunatly, I think the implementation of the idea is FULL of basic assumptions about how microcontent WILL or SHOULD be used, and NO provisions are made for any other type of use.

This is really unfortunate, as I think a brilliant concept can be killed by being housed in a flawed implementation.