mca blog

while doing some posting here, i came on an idea that could be really handy - text macros.

since i talk about the same several subjects quite a bit, i tend to repeat things, make reference to the same people, online documents, etc. and i find myself doing a lot of copy-paste type editing in a blog post. it would be nice if i could use a simple macro token that would be expanded on the server for me when i post an item. kinda like inline bookmark referencing.

it culd work something like this:

everyone should read %fielding-rest-dissertation% and learn it's wisdom.

would be expanded to this on the server:

everyone should read <a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm" title="Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures">Fielding's Dissertation</a> and learn it's wisdom.

you could create a simple UI that allows the management of these tokens. if the server sees the token pattern %#text% then it could call up the service for resolution and get the data back for insert into the document. errors could be quietly left alone, converted to simple text, or cause the server to throw a 4xx to the client for further work.

this could even be done as a public service for others to call. hmmm...