Dodgeball Cannon

Take a regular blog, and flip it around. What do you get? A reversed blog, of course, where vistors write questions or comments and the author anwers. Sounds stupid, but I think people could get a lot of fun and use out of this. I see this manifesting as a single site with multiple instances (e.g. blogger or livejournal), funded by ads, and configurable to control who can ask questions, who can answer, and so on.

Here are a few examples. A couple’s answers their friends’ questions. A researcher’s or expert’s revblog answers questions from others in her field. A CEO’s revblog answers his company’s employees. Changing the parameters around may allow anybody to ask and answer (a forum) or only the author to ask (a traditional blog), but keeping in the spirit of “questions” and “answers.”

For instance, imagine this were a reversed blog where I come up with silly ideas and you tell me if they suck or not. Would that be a good idea?

I’m working on a Greasemonkey script to add syntax highlighting to Wikipedia in Firefox. The trick is to replace the edit page’s textarea with an editable iframe as the page loads, then you can do crazy fun stuff with the document which I will refrain from mentioning because it’s much too nerdy.

At first I thought an extension was the way to go, but its turns out extensions are aimed at tweaking Firefox’s interface, not fussing with the page. Greasemonkey is perfect for the job, since it basically just executes a script on every page that matches a given pattern. Plus, users don’t have to go through the hassle of downloading crap and restarting the application.

This screenshot shows link underlining, headers, and boldface (i.e., embiggening). I haven’t figured out how to handle styling as the page is edited, though, but once that’s out of the way the rest should just be a matter of regex hacking.

Here is a quick WikiSyntax demonstration.