I've been feeling a bit down the past few days. The departure of some good people from Advogato is probably a factor.

I want this to be a good site, and bring people together as part of a community. I know I can't please everybody all the time. But I am wondering if there are some basic things I can do to make this a more congenial place.

First, I deliberately chose a light touch for applying the trust metrics. They're basically opt-in, especially the more recent diary ratings. I had thought that users of this site would have a fairly thick skin, and that simply giving people the tools to filter out stuff they didn't want to see would be sufficient. But perhaps that assumption isn't right. Maybe the default should be to present the recentlog with a trust metric computed relative to a "seed", so that most people wouldn't see low-ranked entries unless they deliberately chose to seek them out.

I've been thinking of doing something like that for an RSS feed of the recentlog anyway, as there aren't good client-side tools for filtering those. So the question is: would stronger filtering bring back the people who left? Is this an important goal, in any case?

There's always been a tension between people wanting to find their own blog hosting, or have them hosted here. As a blog host, this site has been fairly minimalist, although I can definitely see adding in the really important features over time. But perhaps it's more distributed, more Web-like, for each person to be responsible for their own blog hosting, and use other tools to integrate blogs from disparate servers. In the meantime, I think our recentlog provides a useful and interesting mix of individual postings and communal discussions.

Inline functions

After some more thinking, I don't really like the DEF_INLINE macro I wrote about last time. The simplest approach, I think, is to define the "inline" keyword to that of the compiler, or, if the compiler simply doesn't support inlining, then to the empty string, so that each .c file that includes the .h with the inline functions gets its own static copy. An interesting question is: are there any compilers in widespread use today which do not support inlining? Certainly none of the ones I use.