All About Deflexion.com

In addition to blogging, the Deflexion.com site is for experimenting with tools and designs that might be used for the redesign of the www.ii.com site. Below is what was written on the www.ii.com site while I was deciding what software to use and what to call this site. I'm still deciding on the software...

Help Us Choose Wiki-Blog^* Software If you browse around Infinite Ink, you will see that we desperately need to update the design and content of this site. We plan to move the entire site to a wiki or content management system that supports commenting, collaboration, and syndication. The system will be used for

blogging news and musings related to Infinite Inks's interests: computing, mathematics, science, philosophy, writing, and publishing.
maintaining a public knowledge base of all the intertwingled articles, FAQs, tips, tricks, scripts, links, and bits of information that we are currently storing on many different machines in web pages, IMAP mailboxes, web-browser bookmarks, and in an Info Select database.
publishing, discussing, and improving all our articles.
offering alternate versions of articles (multi-page, single-page, printer-friendly, .gz, etc.).
making it easier to find and link to a subsection of an article a) by providing good search tools; b) by having each subsection available both as a separate page and in the context of a larger section; and c) by making it easy to capture the URL that links directly to a subsection.
discussing and improving the software that is — and will be — used to do message deflexion and noise-to-signal (n2s) conversion at deflexion.com and n2s.org. This discussion will cover all aspects of the configuration, everything from NNTP to Syndication to SMTP to IMAP to IMSP to our SpamAssassin configuration, Procmail configuration & recipes, and magnet-update & other scripts.
coordinating the translation of articles to other languages.
discussing whether deflexion.com or n2s.org will become a service provider and what services will be provided to the public.
discussing and improving the design and maintenance of the web sites maintained by Infinite Ink (ii.com, deflexion.com, deflexions.com, googols.org, magoo.com, n2s.org, TheatreOfTruth.com, Qgravity.org).
(maybe) paid technical support similar to Google Answers. In order to do this, or any for-pay service or product, we will need to choose a currency system.

We are considering using one of the following.

Bill Seitz's wikilogs.com because it's based on Zope and it seems to be exactly what Infinite Ink is looking for. But, is it open source software? I posted this question on WebSeitz / wikilog / Thinking Space and now I'm awaiting the answer...
Blogger because it is free (gratis), is incredibly easy to set up & use, supports a BlogThis! bookmarklet in javascript-enabled browsers, is customizable & supports plug-ins, supports sftp so users can use their own web host & their own domain name, supports “BlogSend” for automatically emailing blog entries (for example, to the Infinite Ink discussion group), has a lot of useful features in the pipeline including syndication, and finally because it is owned by Google (so it is probably not going to go out of business any time soon!). Discussion about Blogger takes place here, here, here, and sometimes in Blogger Blog — please tell us about other places to discuss Blogger.
WordPress, which you can get at WordPress.org or sourceforge.net, because it is open source and focused on web standards.
WikkiTikkiTavi because it is what is used for The CSS-Discuss Wiki, which looks better than most wikis. (But maybe that's because the CSS-Discuss folks know how to use stylesheets to make anything look good!)
Kimbro Staken's Syncato, which you can learn about at syncato.org and sourceforge.net, because “it's really an XML fragment management system” and because it's open source. It's also useful that the Syncato discussion group is available via email, NNTP, HTTP, and RSS/XML.
Rael Dornfest's Blosxom, which was designed for OS X but now works on many platforms, because you can create & edit entries using command-line tools, because there are Wikilike Blosxom Plugins (as well as many other plugins), and because it's open source. It's also useful that the Blosxom discussion group is available via email, NNTP, and HTTP.
Conversant because these wiki-blogs are well designed and can be accessed & updated via deflected email & news messages. For an example, see the provocative and intelligent Brian.Carnell.Com and note the intertwingled “Related Topics” (such as the topic Internet > Content Management Systems > Conversant and the provo cative & currently red hot topic Internet > People > Dave Winer).
MovableType because it has a large and active user base, but because of this discussion about the MT license and because it costs $150 for a commercial user, we probably will not use MT. Note that we have nothing against paying for software, but $150 seems expensive compared to the alternatives.
The software that the amazing Wikipedia uses because it supports mathematical symbols.
OddMuse because it is simple and supports mathematical symbols using a LaTeX Extension.
A system written in Python.
A system based on Zope such as Plone or Squishdot. For thoughts about Zope, see Revisiting Zope: An unorthodox approach holds promise for enterprise content management by Jon Udell (InfoWorld, 1 August 2003).
DSpace. Also see In DSpace, Ideas Are Forever By Vivien Marx (NYT, 3 August 2003).

Some interesting thoughts about choosing a Content Management System are at CMSWatch.com and at Chuq Von Rospach's blog in the item Looking for a good CMS.... I'd love to hear more thoughts about this — please post your suggestions in the gmane.org.infiniteink discussion group.

Help Us Choose Our Wiki-Blog Domain Name In addition to deciding on wiki-blog software (see above), we need to choose a domain name for this project. Possibilities include wik.ii.com, blik.ii.com, blok.ii.com, klog.ii.com, simply using www.ii.com, or shifting the project to deflexion.com, deflexions.com, googols.org, or n2s.org. Blok.ii.com is kind of appealing because of the wonderfully weird brain-like nannoplankton called Calicasphaera blokii (pictured at the right) and because BLOK can be interpreted as an acronym for BLOg + KM (knowledge management). But at the moment we're leaning towards some combination of the following.

	Possible URL		Possible Title
	Deflexion.com Deflexions.com ii.deflexion.com		deflecting & reflecting from infinite ink deflexion & reflexion from infinite ink deflexions & reflexions from infinite ink infinite ink deflexion & reflexion infinite ink's deflexions & reflexions

And the two that are links are in testing right now! Note that according to OneLook.com, there are 17 online dictionaries that include the word deflexion and 28 online dictionaries that include the word reflexion so these are legitimate words (in English and in some other languages). What do you think — what would be a good URL or title for the Infinite Ink wiki-blog?!

^†There is no cat either.
^*A Wiki-blog is sometimes called a bliki, bloki, klog (knowledge weblog), or wikilog.