In updating my old ZorkCit project, I came across an old article for CitaNews that I wrote over a year ago. It describes the user-interface issues I took into consideration when designing my first Citadel. It's rather Web-specific, but it does explain some user-interface guidelines that fit any Citadel implementation.

I've decided to name my Python Citadel "MonkeyCit" in the grand tradition of DragCit (written by The Dragon), GremCit (written by The Gremlin), etc. Since I'm Crackmonkey, my choices were "CrackCit" or "MonkeyCit". The decision was pretty obvious.

I'll be starting a Web page for the project soon. For now, there's some aging mailing list archives that describe the early design work on the project.

From the browser:

I'm extremely pleased with how lynx-friendly advogato is. I use lynx partly because when I'm in an edit box like this one, I just hit ^Ve, and up comes $EDITOR (vim in my case). I even turned on syntax highlighting for HTML. You can't do THAT in mozilla!

Of course, this encourages me to write longer diary entries. Make of that what you will.

From the sinuses:

The head cold or sinus infection or whatever it was that was keeping me unable to concentrate during my FreeBSD kernel class last night seems to be subsiding. Of course, now I'm in deadline hell at work.

From the corrupt city government:

Tonight the new sports-whatever stadium in San Francisco opens for business. The traffic congestion will be horrible. I plan to hop on a train and head out of here for the duration. This has been the most poorly-planned operation from the start. Hell, the thing was voted for by the dead to begin with.

First SF destroys its library, and now it does this. Welcome to The City. Guh.