Les Orchard elaborates on the idea.

The Institute for the Future of the Book released CommentPress, a WordPress Theme, that breaks out block-level elements of a blog post into linearly linked nodes. Comments are made on, and displayed with each node.

For example: McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory 2.0 serialized as a weblog, each chapter is a long post, broken down into a stack of nodes, with node-level comments at the side.

There’s another WordPress extension, I think it was done by someone at Yahoo!, that allowed comments at the paragraph level. Anyone remember that one?

Update: It’s Jack Slocum’s work I was thinking of. Thanks to Jeppe Kabell in the comments.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

[1] Cited previously in: From Paper Towels to Hypercard?

Update 4: Plugin now hosted at wordpress.org.

Update 3: New version with support for viewport constants, and iPod Touch.

Update 2: James Craig points out that the ID attribute is not allowed in the META element, so I’ve updated the plugin.

Update: I should add what my aim is. Rather than creating a separate template for mobile, I want to have a theme that ‘does the right thing’ for iPhone and desktop browsers.

Some documentation:

1. Plugin tests user agent string.
   • If it contains ‘iPhone’ then it adds <meta content="width=480; maximum-scale=0.6667" name="viewport"/> to the document’s head.
   • It also adds iPhone specific CSS rules. For that reason, you should call wp_head() in your theme file after you declare your default CSS files.
   • These rules were written with Sandbox in mind. You will want to edit the CSS rules to suit your theme.
   • You can force the viewport and CSS rules by adding forceiphone=y to the query string portion of a URL.
2. Adds a boolean function: weh_is_iPhone().
   • Returns true if user agent string contains ‘iPhone’.
   • You can call this function from your theme to add or turn off generation of markup.
   • Most likely you’ll use it to turn off generation of sidebars.

What I’d like to see is an option to convert the post in MarsEdit to and from Markdown, so I can publish XHTML, and convert back to Markdown if I edit it later.

The obvious desperate web programmer solution is to set up a cron job that drops off a pile of XML and JSON in a cache. But that doesn’t help the 90% of people out there who don’t want to learn the shell, PHP, or JavaScript in order to run their sites.

There’s a wp-cron.php in WordPress 2.1, but there’s no documentation, and no UI for it in the admin screens. I would love to see a control panel for it that allowed you to enter some URLs that you wanted fetched and cached on a regular basis. It could even sanitize the returned data. Then you could use an XMLHTTPRequest wrapper to decorate the page with the cached data. If you were caching HTML fragments, you could set up bindings to named DIVs on the page, and use AHAH.

Here’s my CSS rules for asides. You’ll need to use the Sandbox theme, and I advise adding a link in the head of the main template file for your custom CSS.

NB: my ‘asides’ category is ‘linklist’ so edit appropriately.

The first two rules are from Andy’s post.

body.home div.category-linklist * { display:inline; }

The first rule makes all the children of a post in the linklist category (what I use instead of asides) display as inline rather than blocks.

The next hides the display of elements we don’t want to show in an aside.

body.home div.category-linklist div.entry-date,
body.home div.category-linklist span.entry-author,
body.home div.category-linklist span.entry-category,
body.home div.category-linklist span.metasep {
display:none;
}

Then my tweaks follow:

body.home div.category-linklist h2.entry-title {
font-size: 12pt;
display:inline;
}

Now have the post's title, an H2, display inline, and set the font size to the same as the body of the post.

body.home div.category-linklist h2.entry-title:after { content: ": "; }

This puts a ': ' after the post title, before the body of the aside.

Update: the following section on IE conditional comments isn't behaving right for me.

Unfortunately, IE6 does not implement the :after pseudo-element (even though it's part of CSS 2). So on IE6, the aside title will run into the aside body. The alternative is to hide the H2 for IE using a conditional comment.

<!--[if IE 6]>
body.home div.category-linklist h2.entry-title { display: none; }
<![endif]-->

And now set the padding on the entry so it doesn't run-up against other posts and asides.

body.home div.category-linklist {
padding: 0pt 10pt 10pt 10pt;
}