in

Emerald Hand

Emerald Hand, Inc. community home page.

This Blog

  • Home
  • Contact
  • About
  • Directory of Computers/Tech Blogs

Syndication

Tags

News

I'm back to blogging

Projects

Worm in liquid maze

Design and development of information management tools.

Published by

Comments

 

Worm in liquid maze said:

The RemoteContent helper I released on Monday had a flaw. It pulls and displays the feed correctly,...
August 7, 2005 9:44 AM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

Not long ago I talked about nAnt time stamping. It was an interesting, but unnecessary excersise. If...
November 20, 2005 3:10 PM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

I have mentioned before that I work on Monorail documentation. Mostly I'm doing this in my spare time....
November 22, 2005 7:51 AM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

I have mentioned previously that I researched different wikis for my website and I wanted to share my...
June 15, 2006 3:03 PM
 

Phil Wilson said:

I'm not a big Trac fan, but:

* it can run standalone _or_ behind a webserver like Apache/IIS
* it does support authentication out of the box, either running from hard-coded username/passwords or LDAP etc.
* SQLite is no more difficult to extract data from than MySQL - there are libraries in every language imaginable (Firefox 2 will use SQLite as its backend storage).

But otherwise, yeah, like you say, it's not special in any way, and I actually find its wiki syntax really really really annoying.
June 24, 2006 1:42 AM
 

Ornus said:

Hey. Thanks for the comment. I can't really comment about standalone or authentication. I guess I was wrong about authentication (although I was looking for form-based log-in).

With the export, SQLite does provide libraries, but not tools. For example MS SQL can save database or tables in different formats (CSV for example). I'm pretty sure MySQL can too. I understand SQLite cannot (I would have to write my own tool). Maybe I didn't do enough research, but I realized that Trac isn't for me. An export tool wouldn't have changed that.
June 24, 2006 6:16 AM
 

Jim Bakker said:

Your comments about ConnectedText are not entirely true. It is possible to add icons to any topic. And I am not sure about which "tree" you refer since topics are not organized in a tree like in Wikidpad. I use ConnectedText because Wikidpad is simply not reliable. At every release of it some problems vanish and others appear. Since I started using ConnectedText never again I had to face the problem of application not starting.

I also would like to point that there features in ConnectedText that Wikidpad fall short. Like plugins that enables me to create charts or add mathematical formulas. Support for drag and drop, HTML Help export, etc.

Note that Wikidpad just started to add some of it recent features, like the use of SQL Lite after the appearance of ConnectedText.

July 14, 2006 6:24 AM
 

Ornus said:

Well, they show all notes in a graph (a cluster?). Imho it's still a tree only shown differently, and I don't like it. Maybe I'm more used to explorer-like tree, but ConnectedText way of showing wiki structure isn't easy for me to use.

You're right about icons, but I don't see how to show them in the "navigator"... I might have missed it though.

Wikipad does support custom extensions (and custom syntax btw), but they're not nearly as good as ConnectedText. I don't really need mathematical formulas or charts, appropriate tree is more important. But to some people charts could be important.

You're right about ConnectedText maturity. It's a commercial application and it should have much less problems than Wikipad. So far however I didn't have a lot of issues. New releases add new features, and for me those releases are stable enough. However, Wikipad is still in beta and problems are to be expected.
July 14, 2006 7:28 AM
 

Jim Bakker said:

Hi Ornus,

A graph is not a tree since a wiki is not hierarchical per se. The graph shows links in and out. Note that the graph is not necessary to navigate between topics in ConnectedText. It is just another tool that helps to see how one topic links to others. Like the other tools available.

Wikidpad works more like a two-pane outliner. ConnectedtText is more wiki-like. It it not possible to see the whole strucuture of Wiki since the number of links are very large. For instance, ConnectedText keeps all revisions, a very important feature in wiki systems, a also for me, because it enables me to track down all changes made in a topic.

To show icons in navigator you have to enable it in the options menu.

July 17, 2006 6:23 AM
 

Ornus said:

Hey, both Wikipad and Connected Text store data in a directed graph. Each node, wikitext document, can have more than one parent. Actually Wikipad supports unidirected graph, since it's possible to see parents of the child from the child (it shows a list of nodes) and a list of children (in the tree view). There are different ways to show the graph, and I just happen to like Wikipad way better.

You're right about versions, but in general there's no need to include them in the picture. I might want to look at the old versions, but I don't think ability to find the old version through a link is important. It would actually lead to confusion, since if I removed the link in the new version of the document, I don't want to see it anymore.
July 26, 2006 9:53 AM
 

Community Server Daily News said:

news of the day a grab bag for what's happening in Community Server J-O Eriksson get's the byline
July 26, 2006 12:57 PM
 

Community Server Daily News said:

news of the day a grab bag for what's happening in Community Server Aaaaaand they're off! CS
July 27, 2006 12:25 PM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:


 In my earlier post I wrote about Sider, an information management platform. Read it if you want to...
August 3, 2006 1:55 PM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:


 I wrote about Sider before, what it is and why I'm working on it. I also maintain a wiki with Sider...
August 7, 2006 8:59 AM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:


 I wrote about Sider before, what it is and why I'm working on it. I also maintain a wiki with Sider...
August 7, 2006 8:59 AM
 

PiiXiieeS said:

It's an interesting subject.
What is your opinion about these tools/technologies liken your idea?
 - Ms Sharepoint Services
 - Wiki with plugins allowing you to combine different objects with special features (todo lists, project management, contacts,...)

August 10, 2006 8:03 PM
 

Ornus said:

hey, I'm not really that well familiar with sharepoint services, but I think it and sider have different goals. sharepoint is mostly collaboration platform, to share documents between many users. of course, that means that there should be different types of documents. webparts cover that partially, but I'm not sure sharepoint webparts can be built on top one another to extend supported documents.

sider is specifically designed to allow just that. it's not about collaboration (although it's possible of course) but about storing data in a form that makes it easiest to work with through reuse existing features, and providing separate, independent views for each document. for a example, a document with notes can be shown just as a list of notes, a tree with notes organized, a mind map, etc. I'm not sure this is easy to do in sharepoint.

wiki is really nothing more than graph with wikitext nodes. it's very flexible, but really, there's only single data format, wikitext. it can be used to store tables for example, and there could be many views (openwiking is a good example of this. each skin can actually show data differently). wiki pages can reference each other in any way, but they could be hard to manage, that's the price. in sider each type provides interface to work with it. a tree is always a tree no matter if each node is an HTML note, a task, a wikitext, a list, a graph, whatever. same for all other types. I guess it's possible to build objects on top of wiki that would provide similar features, but I haven't seen anything even close. oh, and also, I really dislike wikitext. it's good for text, easy to edit, but when people try to adopt it for other things, for which it was not originally designed, it quickly becomes cumbersome.
August 11, 2006 11:21 AM
 

PiiXiieeS said:

Ornus,
It really sounds fine.
Anyway I give you some examples from openwiking that seems at least similar to what I understood.
OWNG uses the page object as basic object to store text, links and many other objects that you can embebed by means of macros.
Samples of this objects are TableOfContents, SynonymLinks, groups and authorizations are basic but integrated in special wiki pages, attachments,...
and we can create many others as a Ms Visio embebed, todo lists, ...
All the data can be integrated in the wiki page itself (groups, authorizations, synonyms...) or in special dedicated tables (attachments, interwikis...)

In the easiest way to handle the data can be the difference...
August 11, 2006 6:37 PM
 

Ornus said:

you are right, the easiest way to handle data can be different, however I try to make sure it's simple to add a feature if something is missing, or to fix it if it's cumbersome. everything is done through xml, xslt, js. well, I guess that's really similar to openwiking.
macros seem to be similar to sider types, but are much simpler. I don't think there is a way for them to reference each other, include one inside tho other. there's no OO inheritance, where sider types actually are more flexible than classical OO inheritance.

in openwiking user actually modifies macro. I guess there's a way to create an editor that would provide controls to edit macro code directly, but there's no code sharing between views. another view that would edit macro will need to copy/paste or invent it's own way to edit it. openwiking basically supports two views, editor, in which you have to edit text manually, or themed html view to show the page. there's no view to show wiki map for example, it's possible to do it. but not easy.
August 11, 2006 7:32 PM
 

Matthias Miller said:

That's pretty cool. I can't wait to see it with an interactive editor. This has many interesting possibilities--have you considered transforming into RSS feeds?

August 21, 2006 7:18 PM
 

Matthias Miller said:

By the way, I'm noticing that the word "considered" contains a hyperlink to the Sider project. This looks like a bug. Also, it seems the issue tracker is unavailable right now.

August 21, 2006 7:19 PM
 

Ornus said:

Yeah, thanks, "considered" is a bug, I'll look at it tomorrow.

Issue tracker is up and running now. I was updating it and ran into some issues that forced me to take it down. http://bugnet.emeraldhand.com/Bugs/ProjectSummary.aspx?pid=7 should work for Xelog now.

I haven't thought about RSS. Sounds like an interesting idea. I could probably do that. Thanks for the tip:)

August 21, 2006 8:43 PM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

Today I want to write more on design. In a previous post I talked about design goals, complex vs. simple

September 8, 2006 2:17 PM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

About a month ago I managed to overload myself with work and collapsed from mental exhaustion. I had

September 26, 2006 4:46 PM
 

Pozycjonowanie said:

Well actually, I’m not sure if they work this way on KHTML at all. The first ten are written in C++ and thus might be directly for KHTML, but the last one is written in Objective C++ and part of KWQ (Apple’s fake Qt layer: “KDE Without Qt”). Might need some additional tweakage.

I also can’t test patching myself, as I’m not on a Mac right now. (How far has Nokia come with porting WebCore to GNOME?)

“btw: i am seeing lots of html entities on your site:”

Hmm, are you saying the entities don’t resolve to characters for you?

October 15, 2006 4:06 AM
 

Ornus said:

I'm sorry. I don't quite understand what you are talking about. could you clarify please? what'd you mean by first 10 in C++ and last one in objective C++?

Thanks

October 15, 2006 6:30 AM
 

Daily News Faq List said:

Remember I mentioned seeing a "Readability Stats" CSModule in use for the first time in yesterday's

November 22, 2006 8:39 AM
 

Daily News Faq List said:

Ornus from Emerald Hand Inc adds ShareIt! and a "Readability Stats" CSModule that I've

November 22, 2006 8:39 AM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

In my last post I talked about information and what it is. Today's post is about how people use it and

November 28, 2006 4:36 PM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

In our lives we constantly deal with information. I've talked about what people try to do with it, but

December 2, 2006 9:55 AM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

In our lives we constantly deal with information. I've talked about what people try to do with it, but

December 8, 2006 2:09 PM
 

Community Server Bits said:

Remember I mentioned seeing a "Readability Stats" CSModule in use for the first time in yesterday's

March 12, 2007 8:48 AM
 

Community Server Bits said:

Ornus from Emerald Hand Inc adds ShareIt! and a "Readability Stats" CSModule that I've

March 12, 2007 8:49 AM
 

Worm in liquid maze said:

In the last post I talked about estimation points and why they can result in more accurate estimations

May 9, 2007 3:02 PM
 

Andrew I. said:

Hello! Very interesting! Thank you.

May 29, 2007 1:04 AM
 

budowa domów said:

Good article

May 29, 2007 6:07 AM
 

Programy said:

Interesting article!

Thanks

June 3, 2007 6:39 AM
 

Liquid Maze said:

Information management tools

June 29, 2008 9:29 AM
Copyright © 2006-2007 EmeraldHand, Inc. All rights reserved.
Powered by Community Server (Non-Commercial Edition), by Telligent Systems