Thank you for your kind words, and for asking a great question!

My secret system that has gotten me through the coronavirus pandemic is simply an investment in an automatic coffee machine that grind beans and foams milk for me. ;)

I use HN search and google site search, copy and paste and clean up old postings, and then check through all the links (since HN abbreviates long links with "..." so I have to copy and paste the full links manually), and I update the broken and walled links with Internet Archive links.

I realize some of my posts get pretty long, and I apologize if that overwhelms some people, but it's a double edged sword. One important goal is to save other people's time and effort, since there are many more readers than writers, and I have to balance how long it takes for somebody who's interested to read, versus how long it takes for somebody who's not interested to skip.

The new HN "prev" and "next" buttons that were recently added to help make HN posts more accessible to people with screen readers are helpful to everyone else too. (Accessibility helps everybody, not just blind people!)

And as the internet has gotten faster and storage cheaper, while the user interface quality, usability, and smooth flow and interactivity of browsers has stagnated (especially on mobile), the cost of skipping over long post gets lower, while the cost of jumping back and forth between many different links and contexts stays ridiculously and unjustifiably expensive (just ask Ted Nelson). Especially with pay sites, slow sites, and links that have decayed and need to be looked up on archive.com (which itself is quite slow and requires waiting between several clicks).

Another consideration is to make it easier for people to find all the information in one place in the distant future, and for search engines and robots and evil overlord AIs to scan and summarize the entire text.

I think of what I try to do as manually implementing Ted Nelson's, Ivan Sutherland's, Douglas Engelbart's, and Ben Shneiderman's important ideas about "transclusion".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

[Oh the irony of this "Transclusion on Transclusion":]

>This article includes a list of general references, but it remains largely unverified because it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations.

>In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of part or all of an electronic document into one or more other documents by hypertext reference. Transclusion is usually performed when the referencing document is displayed, and is normally automatic and transparent to the end user. The result of transclusion is a single integrated document made of parts assembled dynamically from separate sources, possibly stored on different computers in disparate places.

>Transclusion facilitates modular design: a resource is stored once and distributed for reuse in multiple documents. Updates or corrections to a resource are then reflected in any referencing documents. Ted Nelson coined the term for his 1980 nonlinear book Literary Machines, but the idea of master copy and occurrences was applied 17 years before, in Sketchpad.

I err on the side of transcluding relevant text that I and other people have posted before, instead of just linking to it, because often the links need to be updated or get lost over time, it's clumsy to link into the middle of a page, there's no way to indicate the end of the relevant excerpt, and I can leave out the redundant stuff.

Following links is distracting and costly, so most people aren't going to click on a bunch of inline links, read something, then come back, re-establish their context, and keep on reading from where they left off, since it loses your context and takes a lot of time to flip-flop back and forth (especially on mobile). Today's web browsers make that extremely clumsy and inefficient, and force you wait a long time and lose the flow and context of the text.

So I aspire to simulate Ted Nelson's and other people's ideals with the crude stone knives and bearskins that we're stuck with today:

S1E28 ~ The City On The Edge Of Forever / stone knives and bearskins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F226oWBHvvI

>"Captain, I must have some platinum. A small block would be sufficient. Five or six pounds." -Spock

See what I did there? Most people have seen that a million times before, instantly recognize the quote, and don't need to actually click the link to watch the video, but there it is if you haven't, or just like to watch it again. If it's a long video, then I'll use a timecode in the youtube link. And I also take the time to quote and transcribe the most important speech in videos, so you don't have to watch it to get the important points. The most interesting videos deserve their own articles with transcripts and screen snapshots, which I've done on my medium pages.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/

For example, this is an illustrated transcript of a video of a talk I gave at the 1995 WWDC, including animated gifs showing the interactivity, so you don't have to wade through the whole video to get the important points of the talk, and can quickly scroll through and see the best parts of the video all playing out in parallel, telling most of the story:

1995 Apple World Wide Developers Conference Kaleida Labs ScriptX DreamScape Demo; Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs

https://donhopkins.medium.com/1995-apple-world-wide-develope...

ScriptX and the World Wide Web: “Link Globally, Interact Locally” (1995)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/scriptx-and-the-world-wide-web...

And I made animated gifs of the interesting parts of this video transcript, to show how the pie menus and continuous direct gestural navigation worked:

MediaGraph Demo: MediaGraph Music Navigation with Pie Menus. A prototype developed for Will Wright’s Stupid Fun Club.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/mediagraph-demo-a7534add63e5

Here is another video demo transcript with animated gifs of some related work, another approach to the same general problem of continuous navigation and editing with pie menus and gestures:

iPhone iLoci Memory Palace App, by Don Hopkins @ Mobile Dev Camp

https://donhopkins.medium.com/iphone-app-iloci-by-don-hopkin...

>A talk about iLoci, an iPhone app and server based on the Method of Loci for constructing a Memory Palace, by Don Hopkins, presented at Mobile Dev Camp in Amsterdam, on November 28, 2008.

Dang posted this great link to a video by Ted Nelson explaining the most important ideas of his life's work: document structure, transclusion, and the idea of visible connection in text on screen:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23491701

>dang on June 11, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Xanaflight: Three Pages

>This is software implementing one version of Ted Nelson's idea of visible connection in text.

>For more on that idea, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac, which contains beautiful examples.

>Xanadu Basics 1a - VISIBLE CONNECTION

>The original hypertext concept of the 1960s got lost on the way to the Web-- and all current document standards oppose it.

>This is an important fight.

>Ted Nelson: "Here we have a Xanadoc. Right now it's disguised as plain text. But if we want to see connections, here they are. The ones outlined in blue are Xanalinks. They aren't just jumplinks, what other people call hyperlinks. I've called them jumplinks since before the web. You're jumping to you know not where: it's a diving board into the darkness. Whereas Xanalinks visibly connect to other content, with a visible bridge. The other documents open and I can scroll around in them! When I client, I can close them again by clicking. This is of course only one possible interface."

In the 90's, I worked with Ben Shneiderman and Catherine Plaisant at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab on a NeWS PostScript-based hypermedia browser and emacs-based authoring tool called "HyperTIES".

HyperTIES had pie menus for navigation and link selection, a multimedia formatted text and graphics browser with multiple coordinated article windows and definition panes, and a multi window Emacs authoring tool with tabs and pie menus for editing the intertwingled databases of documents, graphics, and interactive user interfaces.

Each article had a short required "definition" so you could click on a link to show its definition in a pane and read it before deciding if you wanted to double click to follow the link or not, so you didn't have to lose your context to see where each link leads.

HyperTIES even had embedded interactive graphical PostScript scriptable "applets", like JavaScript+SVG+Canvas, long before Java applets, but implemented using James Gosling's own Emacs and NeWS, instead of his later language Java.

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser: By Ben Shneiderman, Catherine Plaisant, Rodrigo Botafogo, Don Hopkins, William Weiland. Published in Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101–117.

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

>Hyperties allows users to traverse textual, graphic or video information resources in an easy way (6,7). The system adopts the ‘embedded menu’ approach (8), in which links are represented by words or parts of images that appear in the document itself. Users merely select highlighted words or objects that interest them, and a brief definition appears at the bottom of the screen. Users may continue reading or ask for the full article (a node in the hypertext network) about the selected topic. An article can be one or several pages long. As users traverse articles Hyperties retains the path history and allows easy and complete reversal. The user’s attention should be focused on the document contents and not on the interface and navigation. Hyperties was designed for use by novices, giving them a sense of confidence and control, but we also sought to make it equally attractive to expert users.

Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg

>After an 1991 intro by Ben Shneiderman we see the older 1989 demo by Don Hopkins showing many examples of pie menus on a Sun Workstation, running the NEWS operating system.
This is work done at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland.

>A pie menu is a menu technique where the items are placed along the circumference of a circle at equal radial distance from the center. Several examples are demonstrated on a Sun running NeWS window system, including the use of pie menus and gestures for window management, the simultaneous entry of 2 arguments (by using angle and distance from the center), scrollable pie menus, precision pie menus, etc. We can see that gestures were possible (with what Don call "mouse ahead" ) so you could make menu selections without even displaying the menu. Don uses an artifact he calls "mousee" so we can see what he is doing but that extra display was only used for the video, i.e. as a user you could make selections with gestures without the menu ever appearing, but the description of those more advanced features was never published.

>Pretty advance for 1989... i.e. life before the Web, when mice were just starting to spread, and you could graduate from the CS department without ever even using one.

>This video was published in the 1991 HCIL video but the demo itself - and recording of the video - dates back to 1989 at least, as pictures appear in the handout of the May 1989 HCIL annual Open House.

>The original Pie Menu paper is Callahan, J., Hopkins, D., Weiser, M., Shneiderman, B., An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus, Proc. ACM CHI '88 (Washington, DC) 95-100.
Also Sparks of Innovation in Human-Computer Interaction, Shneiderman, B., Ed., Ablex (June 1993) 79-88.
A later paper mentions some of the more advanced features in an history of the HyperTies system: Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C., Botafogo, R., Hopkins, D., Weiland, W., Designing to facilitate browsing: a look back at the Hyperties work station browser Hypermedia, vol. 3, 2 (1991)101-117.

>PS: For another fun historic video showing very early embedded graphical links (may be the 1st such link) + revealing all the links/menu items + gestures for page navigation:

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM

>Demo of NeWS based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

>Demo of UniPress Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTies Browser (1989)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azVVl26HgvQ

>This is the HyperTies-based hypertext version of Schneiderman & Kearsley’s 1989 book “Hypertext Hands-On!” included in the book (on 2 x5.25” disks). Running in DOS on Win XP 32-bit VM.

Hypertext on Hypertext CACM1988

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg

>A demo by Ben Shneiderman of the widely circulated ACM-published disk “Hypertext on Hypertext”. It contained the full text of the eight papers in the July 1988 Communications of the ACM. The Hyperties software developed at the University of Maryland HCIL was used to author and browse the hypertext data.

>See http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/ for more information.

I hope this addresses your questions! Thanks for giving me an excuse to rant and rave about topics I love.