Purple Number plugin for Wordpress

A few weeks ago I had dinner with Doug Engelbart and Shinya Yamada and Doug mentioned to me that he was interested in blogging. We agreed that I would set up him up with some blog software and then he could give it a try and see how he liked it. After Shinya created the domain name for the blog, I decided to install Wordpress since I am familiar with the software and it is easy to configure.

After installing it however, I wasn’t quite satisfied. It didn’t feel right that Doug should use blogging software that didn’t have at least some minimal amount of granular addressability. After all, he was an early proponent of the idea and certainly had the first implementation. At the very least, the blog should have purple numbers with NLS-like Statement Numbers even if Node Identifiers are not stored. Not having an answer right away, I left it for a bit and got distracted with other work.

Tonight, I happened to have a chance to chat with Eugene Eric Kim and asked him about his blog which does happen to implement purple numbers. I thought that perhaps I could install Eugene’s software for Doug instead of using Wordpress. However, he told me that the software was pretty old and was not maintained. He was actually considering moving to Wordpress himself but was holding back because of the same reason (no purple numbers).

Eugene mentioned that there was an old plugin but it only worked on Wordpress 1.x. The other problem is that the plugin seems to have gone missing. I looked around a little bit and found some interesting discussions about purple numbers with blogs. For example, Chris Dent mentioned a Big Day for Purple Numbers (back in May 2004). Tim Bray was using his own modified version of Simon Willson’s JavaScript-based implementation. I played around with that for a while but had some trouble getting the “id” values generated properly for each paragraph.

I figured I’d take a look at writing a plugin for Wordpress to see how hard that would be. It turns out that the Wordpress Developer Documentation is quite well written and the Plugin API is pretty easy to use. I’m not much of a PHP coder but luckily it wasn’t too much code. After mucking around for a few hours and with some help from the preg_replace() function I was able to get something working.

I installed the plugin on my own blog first to try it out. If it works without any problems, then I’ll put it on bootstrap.org and that should make Doug’s blogging a little more granularly addressable. The plugin source code and instructions are available on my site. Try it out and give me feedback on what you think.