Looking for blogging tools that support marginalia

I'm looking for ideas on how to support a composition style that I can easily do in my paper notebooks but which is completely absent in all of the blogging tools I've ever seen.

I'd like to have a sidebar or margin notes or marginalia attached to each blog entry. If you look at my immediately previous post that has the scanned in moleskine, you'll see some indication of what things look like on paper - and I don't find it possible to replicate that in any blog tools out there. Each "entry" is composed of some core text, and then some sidebar text (e.g. in a div) that's rendered immediately to the left or right of the page in question. Most importantly, the marginalia stays with the post, and is not just some blah standard nav sidebar.

You'd want to do something reasonable when you laid out a chronicle of these, and of course I'd love to see ecto support some kind of offline editing for this so that I have my usual tools.

One thing that would be hard in doing this perhaps is that the standard RSS and ATOM namespaces only have space for the entry, and not for any annotations. So doing this in any kind of mass market standardized way is going to be messy.

Technorati Tags: moleskine, marginalia

Comments

[Vicki]

Have you considered tables? That might take some getting used to but it might do as you wish...

Can we embed frames in weblog entries? interesting possibility...

Or... popup JavaScript windows for the marginalia?

[Matt Hampel]

You could build margin notes like captions on Subtraction (EX: http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2005/1003_groupthink_m.php). That requires a srict grid and keeping functional sidebars (like "recent comments") to one side. If you use a WYSIWYG editor, just create an element that uses your margin-note markup.

[JoshD]

A suggestion:

See if you can't hack the "extended" entry so that instead of concealing the text in the extended entry, with a "Read More..." link, instead it shows up as marginalia.

This means you're giving up the ability to post long entries with a cut, but it has the advantage of not deviating from the RSS or ATOM spec.

[Bill Tozier]

I suppose there are a few other ways to display marginalia, beyond merely in the margins,such as appendices and footnotes. One structural question you'll want to consider is whether you want to type them inline (as in TeX and some other text processors), or leave them as individual notes piled in a big stack somewhere, with an abstract association to the text that's referred to.

The same, by the way, could be said for illustrations.

How are those odd little popup glossary things handled in Microsoft Help? The ones that are represented with dotted underscoring?

[Adam Shostack]

Stefan Geens (http://www.stefangeens.com/) has some nice css that I've been planning to take and work into my blog.

Adam

[Edward]

Thanks all for the suggestions.

I prefer to edit the marginalia as a big piece of side text, vs. putting it inline. That's mostly a preference of composition learned from doing the same on paper. There's something appealing about having two parallel white spaces to write in. (that's not to say that the system wouldn't inline it for me later)

Popups are not my style, too much visual clutter.

The look of Stefan's CSS is just about exactly right, good catch there Adam. (And good to see you today.)

[Kelley]

It's certainly possible to write the CSS that would enable you to display your entry with a side bar inside the entry #div. But even then, the text in the composition window wouldn't appear that way to you, so you wouldn't get the immediate visual appeal of margin space adjacent to your main content.

Someone would have to write a plugin that would transform the composition space and add some coding to your style sheet.

Best,

Kelley

[Anil Dash]

Ed, you know TypePad supports Notes TypeLists, right? They're designed specifically for putting notes in the sidebar of your blog. There's more info on our blog:

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/2005/08/notes_typelist.html