Discourse

It’s the forums

June 3, 2022

Forums are the dark matter of the web, the B-movies of the Internet. But they matter. To this day I regularly get excellent search results on forum pages for stuff I’m interested in. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t end up on some forum, somewhere, looking for some obscure bit of information. And more often than not, I find it there.

~ Jeff Atwood from, https://blog.codinghorror.com/civilized-discourse-construction-kit/

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That’s a wonderful unpack by Atwood of why Discourse, (a piece of software that powers forums,) was created. Along the way there’s also a load of great information about discourse, (the concept.) And this article is now 9 years old.

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Personal knowledge systems

November 16, 2020

Continuing my deep dive—hopefully it doesn’t become a drowning—into Knowledge Systems: Yesterday I spent a little time tinkering with Discourse to see what I could do with it. There is a mind-numbing array of tools that could be used, but I keep coming back to the point that I don’t actually understand what I’m trying to build.

I’ve spent significant time thinking about that, and reading about that, but it’s still not clear. It’s like standing in an aisle of tools each shiny and powerful; I know people who have piles of tools. Fortunately, the best way to understand is to build. And so building I am. (Out of sight privately, sorry.)

I seem to recall hearing a metaphor about house building: Start with a sofa in the lawn, add features as needed. Be prepared to knock it down and start again.

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