This here page is about marge, the Interactive Marginalia Processor. It's a collection of Perl scripts I wrote a while ago, which allow web pages to be annotated by their readers. Probably you're thinking - right, great, yet another commenting system, and a pretty shoddily designed one at that. Well, yeah, fair enough, but this is meant to be a bit different. The idea's to mimic the aesthetic of actual pencil-on-paper annotation, allowing notes to be directed at particular sections of the text. Well, I think it's a funky idea, anyway...

So. We've got the main page on the right, and the margin on the left. To write in the margin, you follow one of those little "a" links to the left of the line you want your annotation to be centred on. When a note's been attached to a line, the "a" turns into a ">" - follow it to go to the annotation, allowing you to read it in full when it's been cut short by surrounding marginalia (indicated by a trailing "...") or to annotate the annotation. Recursive annotation is in this way possible, allowing for limited threaded discussions of a kind. You can tell if a note is benoted without having to go to it - notes without any notes of their own are printed in italics, and in normal roman otherwise.

Feel free to play around on this page - it's intended as a sandbox.

Marge has some limited capabilities for text formatting. To start a new paragraph, put \p before it. To start a new line, use \n. If you enclose a word or set of words in asterisks, they'll come out bold. Pluses work similarly to give italics. You can also do links - though I can't be arsed to explain how right now.

That's about it as far as you petty mortals are concerned. Marge also allows Wiki-style page editing and creation for those nominated as Gods (on this site, just me), and some other stuff I don't feel like explaining. Comments are very welcome indeed - annotate, or contact me directly. The source is available at perlmonks, though that's an old version. It's all very much a WIP. One day, I'll clean it up properly. One day. Except actually I probably won't, because it's silly and stupid.