Now, I can see the logic behind
external linking, at least to some small extent. The way I see it, the policy on external linking doesn't screw with
E2's format; it would be confusing to click the node
Milkbone, and end up at
goatse.cx. The possibility of something like that happening is not acceptable. That's the extent of my consideration of the matter, and I suppose that, ultimately, my view of it is a little shortsighted. I guess that this matter (external linking, not my shortsightedness) was probably considered upon development of ECore, so I don't know how much support is given to actually creating an outside link. I know it can be done, but I don't know if it's for
e2gods, or for a select few e2gods, or editors as well, or whatever, but I do know it's there.
The Proposal
What I propose is to create a list of web pages (probably some superdoc akin to the Reference Desk) that can be permitted outside links, and to make those outside links more readily available to John Q. E2'er. Because I, for one, find the outside links a little out of the way, and rare to come by.E2's Reference Desk is nice, but not totally wonderful, in that it's easily forgotten by the people who are already good writers and researchers to some extent at least (I didn't think of it until I thought of this writeup, for example).
Great! Where the hell do these outside links appear?
Easy. On the Duplicates Found page. Say you're searching E2 for "Hell". The Dupes found page comes up, saying there's a user and an e2node with that name. Underneath that, it could say "Or, would you like to go to the "hell" website? That'd be the external link, to hell.com or whatever.
There would have to be a limit as to what sites can be outside linked, of course, and E2 powers-that-be could keep the list small, for example:
http://www.blockstackers.com
http://www.slashdot.org
http://www.everydevel.com
http://www.perlmonks.org
And there should be, in my opinion, a few other sites that have a chance of appearing on the "Duplicatess Found" page:
http://www.google.com
http://www.linux.org
http://www.perl.org
http://www.microsoft.com (shut up, Microsoft-haters, you know what I'm trying to say)
Who knows? Maybe even K5 or somethingawful, or whatever (but then again, maybe not, seeing as how I despise K5, for absolutely no reason), and a few others. I lost the bright ideas for the sites. OSDN was one, and sourceforge. All within convenient reach of the E2 user. There are sites that are, of course, far better explained on their own pages than in a small body of text here on E2. It has its place on E2, of course, being that we should feed everything everything. But the convenience of going directly to an important website (read: copyleft, haha) is important, if everything is to be used, as I do, for a teaching tool. What better option for the user than to show them the real thing, when necessary?
Sounds cool, kid. The question is: However Does a Person Implement This Wondrous Change In The Course of Human Events?
I haven't the slightest idea. The extent of my Perl knowledge goes little beyond defining the term "sleep()", so I won't bother with any of that. Given that there is support for outside linking in the core code, I doubt it would be too difficult to whip a project like this, especially for our illustrious JayBonci and N-Wing. And that, my friends, is all I have to say about that. Comments? Suggestions? Mail that makes a ticking/humming sound? Gifts? /msg me. On to the next idea.