You may want to follow the whole set of articles about my academic workflow:

• Part 1: Reading – Organizing
• Part 2: Everyday tools
• Part 3: Everday tools (following)

Today, we delve a bit more into my everyday tools. Last time I mentioned the most important softwares for me. But since then, my workflow has changed a bit.

Online tools

More and more, I turn myself to online tools. Several reasons for this. One of the main reasons is to get access to all my stuff from everywhere. It is more than valuable.

Let’s say I work on something at work and then get the brightest idea ever while comfortably sitting at home. If I did not use online tools, I would jot down the idea somewhere and have to integrate it later into my workflow. What a waste of time! Instead, I can directly shove the idea in my online notebook and everything keeps running smoothly! That’s why I put my TiddlyWiki online using TiddlySpot. I could have stuck to the DropBox workflow but it is actually a bit restrictive considering that you have to install DropBox on the computer. Well, you have DropBox’s web access which you can use but it does not offer the same simplicity as TiddlySpot in my opinion.

Another great online tool I will talk about is Sage, an online mathematics software.

TiddlySpot

It was fairly simple to create a TiddlyWiki before TiddlySpot but it has become even more painless. When you connect to TiddlySpot, you are given four options; all of them to create a TiddlyWiki. The four options correspond to four different sort of TiddlyWiki templates:

• Standard: to create a wiki as you can download it from TiddlyWiki’s homepage.
• MPTW (before MonkeyPirateTiddlyWiki): a standard TiddlyWiki with a bunch of useful pre-installed plugins. I do not use it (I haven’t seen yet the limitations of the standard TiddlyWiki) so I cannot say much about it but you can check the homepage which contains all the information you need and a tutorial to TagglyTagging, the feature that seems to make MPTW a really different product than TiddlyWiki.
• MonkeyGTD: if you are a fan of this get-it-done you may find the tool of your dream there
• d3: or there

Once you have created your wiki on TiddlySpot, you simply go to the url you have been assigned and manage your wiki from there. You can also download a local working copy if you want to wander a bit off the wire. When you’re done and want to be back to the online world, just hit Upload in the menu on the right-hand side and you will be uploaded back to TiddlySpot’s servers. Kind of the nice functions that make things much easier!

By the way, there is an Upload tab in the backstage as well but I could not make the uploading work by this way. It actually took me a while before realising that a silent link was patiently lying and waiting for me in the right-hand side menu!

One other trick: I started to work with TiddlyWiki but without TiddlySpot. This means that I already had a wiki of my own on the disk of my computer. Adding the tiddlers from my existing wiki to my freshly running wiki on TiddlySpot was far from simple in my sense. I tried first to import my wiki html file into TiddlySpot. This did not work for an obscure reason I had no time to solve. So what I did (and trust me it takes me more than a few minutes to figure out this yet simple method) is that I downloaded locally my TiddlySpot wiki (newly created and empty, that is). Then from this local version I imported my existing wiki file. Although it hadn’t work online it worked here. Don’t ask me why! Once imported I uploaded my local TiddlyWiki file (the one I downloaded from TiddlyWiki) back to TiddlySpot’s servers. And now everything works fine!

Sagemath

Sage is a python-based online mathematical software. This means it offers you the possibilities that Python intrinsically has. You can either download a version to work locally or use the online tool with the advantage of keeping your calculus sheets available from everywhere. The online version has one big drawback and this is computation speed. Well, maybe the computation speed is good but transmitting commands and fetching the results over internet is far from being instantaneous. Putting this aside or, rather, considering my modest computation needs, the online tool is perfect to carry out small calculations.

I have not explored the possibilities of Sage but I stumbled upon interesting points such as exporting to latex while I read the documentation (which I encourage those interested in it to do to get a better picture of this software). There is also a tutorial to guide you through the most important features.

Now this was more of a geek spurt and I find honestly that Matlab, which I have installed at work and, more important, which I am used to handle, is enough for me. I say enough but I do not know if Sage offers something better! The point here is that I do not feel like learning a new software, even if it could actually make me learn Python at the same time. So I stick to Matlab but I wanted to share the Sage opportunity!

You may want to follow the whole set of articles about my academic workflow:

• Part 1: Reading – Organizing
• Part 2: Everyday tools
• Part 3: Everday tools (following)

Last episode

Last time, (par ici), I talked about my reading method and how I keep my files organised in CiteUlike for easy sharing and in BibDesk for easy referencing. Today, I will explain what my day-to-day workflow is.

Tiddlywiki

One tool which I grew a big fan of is TiddlyWiki. As the name suggests it, it gives you with a ready-to-run wiki platform. I said platform but it is actually a single file, called by default empty.html. You open this file in your favorite browser and you are ready to go. I did have some problems with Safari which I use on my laptop. So I ended up using Firefox for the purpose of this file.

But what is TiddlyWiki exactly? It is, as said above, a single wiki file. You can then edit the file directly inside your browser, as you would do for any wiki. The changes can be saved via clicking on a link or automatically after editing an entry. (By the way, these entries bear the amusing name of “Tiddlers”.)

What is the point of having such a wiki? I use it as a notebook. I can create entries based on subjects, dates, concepts or whatever other category I like. The best thing is the wiki link capability which allows me to couple one entry to another. I have for example one entry per day. It helps me track my advancement. I think this history will become more than valuable when the time to write my thesis comes.

Remember the milk

Most of you have probably heard about productivity methods. I am not a ardent supporter of these methods. But what I picked up from them is to jot down small todo-lists which I can refer to regularly. An excellent free online tool named Remember the milk is available to exactly let me do that. It does exactly what you expect a list-creating software to do, and that is creating list! It does only that, but it does it well. A lot of features wrap up the whole things. You can for example:

• Tag your tasks
• Share your task
• Associate notes, places, links … to all your tasks
• Synchronise your lists with ICAL
• Add reminders (sms, mails, …)

Really an indispensable tool to use!

Dropbox

I mentioned it before, I work on several computers. Mainly my laptop (a mac) and my computer at work (a PC running Windows XP). When using different computers, the issue of maintaining synchronism (oops sorry, my writing is being contaminated by quirky expressions coming from my electrical engineering studies!), the issue of maintaining synchronism becomes a natural question.

You could always have a usb stick in your pocket. That will for sure work well. But you can choose Dropbox which does exactly that and much more. It can be installed on any computer (I installed it on my work PC with restricted permissions without asking the freaky tech guy for help!). It creates a folder on every computer it is installed on. Let’s say you create a file in this folder. Well, it will be updated on every other computers with Dropbox installed and configured with your account settings. You get 2 GB for free when signing-up for a new account. It keeps also track of the files’ history. A browser is available for that online. You can get a preview of a previous version of a file.

I use it to store my thesis, so I can write either at home or at the university and keep both versions synchronised. I put my TiddlyWiki file in the Dropbox folder as well, for the same reasons. It is really the key component in my workflow, as I travel from home to the university and vice versa!

TiddlyWiki is a great way to store and share notes, to do lists, task lists, or really anything else that fits well in a wiki style system.  You store things in “tiddlers”, which are small portions of text on the page.  From the intro page:

Most web sites and wikis manage information as pages. TiddlyWiki is different — it saves your stuff in smaller chunks (each chunk is called a ‘tiddler’).

I found a lot of people on Stack Overflow recommended it, so I gave it a try.

BTW, I will from now on refer to it as TW because TiddlyWiki makes me cringe every time I say it to someone at work… “Yeah, I finally found a good place to put all my notes, it’s portable, extensible, simple, and free.”  “Oh yeah, what’s it called?”  “TiddlyWiki…yeah it’s…here I’ll just send you a link…”

The main thing I like about it is that it’s all stored in one HTML file, which makes backup and syncing a breeze.  (I haven’t tried it yet, but soon will and I’ll update the blog.)

It’s also customizable.  You can change the colors, fonts, borders, or anything else really since it’s all just HTML and CSS.  I haven’t delved into the customization too far yet, just enough to satisfy my own obsessive tendencies – the main thing I change was the border around the tiddlers (it’s a  little hard to see where one ends and the next begins) and the color scheme.

There are also several variations, such as TiddlyBackPack, GTDTiddlyWiki, and several others.  I tried some of them, but in the end stuck with the simplicity of the original.

So what started out as a test run has become my primary daily notes system.  I’ve replaced my previous “system” (whiteboard-sticky notes-notepads-Outlook notes-emails to myself at 3 different addresses) with one simple, customizable one.  So for what it’s worth, I highly recommend it!

Last week was quite relaxed, I didn’t get much work done but I did spend quite a while thinking about which direction my research is heading in the next few months. There are a couple of things I definitely want to get done this week, and three or four others that I would like to complete.

• I need to get my organising finished this week, it is almost there so I should manage it. I am finding that I am missing sitting down to some serious research rather than the quick adding bits here and there as I go through my files, so I am aiming to get all my paper files sorted this week.
• It has been a while since I went to an archive, so next weekend I want to make a visit. I’m not sure which one, the West Sussex Record Office looks favourite at the moment, but maybe the London Family History Centre (not strictly an archive I know but close enough), the Hampshire Record Office or the Surrey History Centre. So I need to decide which one and put together a research plan.

Those are the two most important ones, but if I get time (that if should really be in bold and capitals) I also have the following I would like to do:

• I still need to finish updating the appearance of my blog, tidy up the sidebar and update my blogroll.
• I have a number of blog posts I want to write, and if I am not careful they are going to fall by the wayside and won’t be timely anymore, so not worth doing.
• I still need to find a database to record my postcards, something that will deal with several different collections and handle the images and descriptions all in one package. My biggest worry is that I will enter all my data into one program and find that I am stuck with that program forever, so I may try and just use Microsoft Access.
• Having had a look at prezi.com last week (probably too much effort to set up each family), I am going to investigate using TiddlyWiki for presenting aspects of my family history. I particularly like the fact that all you need is a web browser to run it, and that it doesn’t need to be online (but could be).

I’m been a huge fan of DokuWiki for many years now.  Since I worked in a huge corporate development environment where structured documentation was hard to set-up I managed to pull a great number of resources together using DokuWiki and make it available to my whole team.  The culture was such that I was pretty much the only person keeping it up to date … but that’s a different story.

I’m now using it to with a portable web server and DropBox to keep it synchronised across multiple Internet connected devices – which works as I’m the only person contributing to this one.  But I can see a need (in my current organisation) for one team to move away from individual wikis (or more precisely TiddlyWikis) that are manually copied centrally from time to time; and towards a set-up which is a shared wiki – the way wikis were meant to be.

Whilst our latest pilot of SharePoint would certainly fulfil the sharing criteria, it won’t allow all users to work in the way they need to.  The reason for this is Internet connectivity.  Not everywhere and everyone has an always on 100% reliable connection.  Just try travelling on a cross-country train for example.  This is a big issue for an increasingly mobile workforce like ours.

The solution is certainly non-trivial as there are synchronisation issues to deal with.  Even if you had a wiki that you split into spaces for individuals you would find that as well as the potential for producing fragmented content (e.g. two users posting complimentary information in two separate locations), there is also the issue of how to automatically rebuild search indexes.

I’m always on the look out for something to tackle this sort of issue and the nearest I’ve ever seen until now has been SocialText’s TiddlyWiki inspired check-out solution.  But now it looks like the solution may have been right under my nose for some time and I’ve never noticed.

DokuWiki is based on a simple file system structure rather than a database structure.  Not hugely scalable in performance terms, but a little inefficiency on something inherently straight forward like this means that faster hardware can be applied to mitigate the situation.  DokuWiki’s author Andrea Gohr has developed a synchronisation plugin for DokuWiki that seems to take care of everything.  Whilst it won’t merge multiple-author edits (i.e. the original page was updated online and a new edit based on the old one has been created offline) automatically it will flag them for manual edit. For me I wouldn’t want to risk the loss of information or the creation of a nonsense page through automatic handling so really this is a non-issue.  Everything else seems to be handled including the usual DokuWiki login based restricted access, separation of name spaces, etc.

I’m not sure why I’ve never come across it before but now I have I’m met with another quandary.  Before I recommend this internally I’d like to try it out and given it a field test of some sort.  However Andreas has chosen an interesting experiment for releasing this particular plugin.

The plugin was written many months ago and he is asking for donations towards its release.  When released it will be available to everyone to download and use for free and will effectively be released under the usual GPL2 licensing agreements.  He’s most of the way there in terms of donations, but not quite so I can’t yet evaluate it just yet.  Given the financial processes we have in place for purchasing things from sources who aren’t preferred suppliers (i.e. directors and credit cards vs. accounts and purchase orders) and the current pressures on the public sector during these financially unstable times I don’t feel as though I can provide enough of a business case to try this when we’ve invested so recently in a system based around very similar collaboration for the whole organisation.

For now I’ll have to hang in there and keep an eye on the total and this interesting “Liberationware” experiment*.

* I was going to use the term “Ransomware” but according to Wikipedia that’s not the right definition!…

Ciertamente, alguno puede pensar que sigue prefiriendo su libreta. Es respetable. A vosotros, los amantes del papel, os dejo con este otro blog en inglés.

I’m under attack from hayfever at the moment thanks to my horse ride this morning, not very nice, but definitely worth it as I love being around horses. I had a lovely ride around the country lanes today. Sadly it’s the season for horse flies and they were continually plaguing the poor horse so I spent a lot of time acting as his fly swat. I know how much the horse fly bites hurt so it was quite satisfying getting them!
     
Once I got back I was freshly inspired to have a look over my children’s horse story. After reading it through I decided that the opening scene needed to be rewritten. The plot’s changed a lot since I started writing the story and the one I had didn’t work anymore so I spent some time thinking about what I wanted from the scene and the story as a whole. I then started writing the replacement scene. I got to 302 words and though the scene wasn’t complete I wasn’t feeling right frame of mind –thanks to my hayfever – to do the scene justice so I decided to leave it there and move onto something else.
   
Happily, I managed to get all 19 world building files for my mist fantasy novel onto my TiddlyWiki and linked them to the relevant characters etc.
   
It’s defineatley helping the story come together in my mind and I’d recommend using TiddlyWiki for planning to other writers.

My next job is to get the ‘plot’ files on and link them.

I can’t believe it’s been so long since I stopped blogging. Wow… 9 months! I could even have made a whole new person in that time! I wish I could say I’ve been away doing something exciting like travelling the world, getting a job at the animal park or, even better, getting published, but unfortunately I’ve just been living my boringly normal life. I’ve done a bit of writing – half of a child’s book and planning for yet another new fantasy series – but still no finish lines crossed.

But hopefully this is going to help me get one there: Holly Lisle’s Write a Book With Me.

It’s a great idea of Holly’s and has helped me get writing and also has got me back here. I’ve been playing along for the last three days and am going to be recording my progress so far:

Wed 1st July = 1,285
Thur 2nd July = 465
Fri 3rd July = 181
Total so far = 1931

I know the totals have gone down, but yesterday I worked over my lunch and again for a couple of hours last night on getting the planning and files for the new fantasy series – I’ll call it Mist Fantasy Novel for now as I have no idea about title yet – onto a TiddyWiki file. The planning was getting a bit crazy with over 40 different files and I wasn’t sure where it was all headed and the TiddlyWiki seemed like a great way to collate it all. It worked well yesterday as I got all my ‘character’ and ‘draft’ folders transferred and linked their relationships as they stand now. I also discovered a character I’d forgotten about who I think will be quite entertaining to write about and hopefully for people to read about one day.

Right now I’ve got some dogs watching me reproachfully wondering why I’m sitting here writing when plainly I should be out taking them for a nice long walk so I should obey the little beasts and take them out. After that hopefully I’ll be able to get some of the world building entries up and link them.

While I’m doing the planning for MFN I’m going to do my writing for the children’s horsey book, which stands at about 20k so far. That way I’ll be able to keep my writing fresh and hopefully get one book over the finish line! Although now I’m thinking maybe a TiddlyWiki for the horse book might be helpful too… Ack, no – it’s time to be bold. I have the story planned – I’ll get the first draft done then I can do a TiddlyWiki for the revisions. I have to write the words ‘The End’ one day!

Good luck for everyone else having a go at this and thanks to Holly for coming up with the idea.

Since founding the nonprofit UnaMesa Association I’ve struggled to find an easy way to communicate our mission.  In this blog posting, I explore a new approach to explaining the mission of UnaMesa by analogy with organizations like POST (Peninsula Open Space Trust) that purchase natural lands  on behalf of the community and turn them into parks and preserves.

First, here’s the old approach where I start by describing the big picture.

Usually I start by pointing out that society faces tremendous challenges in providing education, healthcare, and social service in our current political economy. Most people understand and agree.  Some even go on to express their unease about living in a society that generously rewards bankers and athletes but pays teachers poorly.  Most people also “get” the difference between technology and service when I give the example of cell phones changing every year, but going to see a doctor or sitting in a classroom not changing much in 50 years.  They see the improvements brought about in their personal lives by technology, however, going to a doctor seems to become ever more painful.

So far, so good.

People generally understand the problems we’re trying to solve and even understand that you can’t “pay” someone to truly care about serving their students, patients, or clients.  Then I say something like “we’re moving from an industrial economy to a service economy.”

At this point, most people nod but you can see their eyes glazing over a bit.

Then I might point out that the current mechanisms for market based pricing don’t actually work for intangibles because there’s an infinite supply of anything digital (information, music, software).  [Three problematic concepts -- "market pricing", "intangibles", "infinite" ] Not only that, but the value of a service, such as education and healthcare depends on both the intangible information and the quality of the interaction between the provider and the client.  [People may like or dislike their teachers, but they don't explicitly think about quality of interaction or really think through the notion that a student must play an active role in the process. You can't pour knowledge into a student's head the way you pour oil into an engine.]  But since the value of an interaction is not visible in the form of cash or other rewards, there’s very little incentive for organizations to really improve the interactions through innovation.  In fact, the economics are such that innovative providers who care enough to try to improve the system usually get penalized in the form of fewer billable hours, fewer reimbursements, or more time away from their private lives.  [Lot's of poorly understood concepts there: incentives, innovation, economics....]

By now most people have turned away to find a more engaging conversation partner.

Then comes the real kicker, transitioning to an innovative service economy requires a new approach to pricing.  A dynamic system that can make visible the value of interactions to both provider and client.  Perhaps using the equivalent of complex numbers (AKA imaginary numbers like the square root of -1) where one component represents the tangible good (supply/demand) and the other represents the intangible (information/quality) parts of the exchange.  Except for true fellow geeks, that’s pretty much a show stopper for the audience.  [And even the geeks are as likely as not to go off on a number theory tangent.]

For the few kind souls that remain, I can finally get to the point – UnaMesa plays the role of a “market maker” for service innovation.  We facilitate and promote better services by “buying” and maintaining software, web services, and other intangibles that support 2-way interactions between providers and clients.  We aim to help create a robust system for the exchange of intangibles and foster service innovation that truly values and makes visible the value of better experience for both providers and clients.

For example, SharedRecords.org is a free, online service for securely storing and sharing medical records, transcripts, and any other information that a doctor, teacher, or social worker needs in order to care for a client.  By making the infrastructure freely available, we ensure that the digital version of the information can be retrieved wherever and whenever needed but it’s always under the control of the client and their providers.  Instead of fighting with the bureaucracy of a hospital or school to get access to their records, clients give the equivalent of a receipt to their caregiver who can instantly access the relevant documents.  From the SharedRecords point of view, timely access to your medical or educational history should be the equivalent of roads, bridges, and waterways, part of the basic infrastructure that we all take for granted.  It should not be a point of competition between service providers.

The alternative approach: UnaMesa as an Open Space for Knowledge

The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) , and similar conservation organizations, protect natural lands by purchasing private property and converting it into preserves and park lands that benefit the larger community in perpetuity.  In Silicon valley and the larger San Francisco Bay Area, these organizations have played a critical role in maintaining the beautiful landscape and large tracts of wild areas despite the tremendous pressures of commercial development.  The open space supports a vibrant natural ecology that benefits everyone living in the area.

Similarly, the UnaMesa Association seeks to protect and maintain intangible property that supports a healthy knowledge ecology.  We acquire private “intellectual property” on behalf of the community and encourage compatible uses of that knowledge to serve the public interest.  Because UnaMesa is a “not for profit”  organization, individuals and organizations can trust that their use of the software, services, books, or other intangible properties will not be subject to “monetization” by a private property holder who could deny them access or demand royalty payments.

This trust encourages people to build upon the property held by UnaMesa in order to continually improve and add to the knowledge.  Unlike the physical property held by POST, UnaMesa’s goal is not preservation.  Rather we seek continual improvement of an ever expanding knowledge space.  Whereas access to physical property must be limited to avoid the degradation that comes with usage, intangible property and knowledge benefit from widespread & unlimited use.  Fixing a bug in a software program, re-using a lesson plan, or sharing best practices in maintaining medical records benefits all community members.  This is just the opposite of real property where consuming an apple or chopping down a tree makes it unavailable for anyone else.

So, UnaMesa acquires intellectual property, maintains it and makes it accessible to the community while promoting compatible uses that increase the pool and value of knowledge.

Similar to POST, we operate as a Trust to hold intellectual property in the public interest and work with the broader community to identify properties of interest and solicit the resources necessary to acquire those properties.  In some cases, this might mean getting a compatible license rather than acquiring the copyright directly.  These licenses are analogous to “conservation easements” and other arrangements that POST might use to protect natural lands.

The TiddlyWiki community is a good example of this whole process.  TiddlyWiki is a piece of wiki software that runs directly in a web browser.  It’s a bit like the software behind Wikipedia except it does not require any server side software.  This means that any individual or organization can create their own wiki and have complete control over how that wiki operates.  They can share the wiki with others by simply sending them an HTML file.  No Internet connection is required to view or to add to the information.  UnaMesa acquired the TiddlyWiki core software in 2007 from Osmosoft, a small software development group.  This ensured that the TiddlyWiki software remained accessible and supported by the community even after Osmosoft was purchased by British Telecom later in the year.  Over time, the number and types of uses has continued to grow and evolve.   TiddlyWiki is now used in a wide variety of settings, including by students and teachers sharing class notes, doctors maintaining medical notes, and as a tracking tool for engineering project managers  – in addition to the core function of being a personal notebook.  UnaMesa supports this community by hosting a software and knowledge repository at TiddlyWiki.org, paying for maintenance and improvement to the core code, and responding to requests for help on the newsgroups.  In return, community members contribute “plugin” software that improves the function of TiddlyWiki, templates and example documents for others to use, and plenty of support to each other through the online forums.

Just as POST is not the only conservation group, UnaMesa is not alone in trying to create an open space for knowledge.  Creative Commons has done a tremendous job in drafting and promoting copyright licenses (e.g. “easements”) that encourage reuse and distribution.  The Free Software Foundation, the Apache Foundation, and the Mozilla Foundation are the better known examples of groups that promote the development and distribution of open source software.  I liken these groups to agricultural or land use coops where a group of farmers might come together to protect their access to water or build a shared processing plant.

The primary focus of the software foundations lies in developing specific pieces of sofware.  They’re generally run by and for the developers to spell out the rules of how software updates are contributed, who gets to decide what code goes in the “official” release, etc.  To my knowledge, however, these organizations do not generally pay developers for their contributions, they do not focus on the needs of service providers (e.g. education, healthcare, social services), and they do not seek to acquire other types of intangible property that would serve the larger community.

UnaMesa is still a very young organization and very much an experiment in ways to improve service innovation.  We believe that there’s a tremendous and productive middle ground for innovation and knowledge that lies between the extremes of private “free” property.  The conservation model of POST provides some interesting analogues for us to follow.

In the end,  UnaMesa wants to do two things:

• Make sure that the developers, writers, teachers, and other creative folk can earn a decent living, while
• Encouraging and promoting widespread access to knowledge that’s necessary for delivering the best possible education, healthcare and social services

In other words, we want to help create the foundation for a healthy service economy where we, as a society, can see and make decisions based more on the quality of interactions and rely less on the industrial notions of supply and demand.

Well, I’m still not sure if the POST analogy works better.  Will have to try it out at the next dinner party and see how many people fall asleep.  Sure can’t be worse than the old approach!

I’m thinking about offline or local wiki solutions that can run in a lab or on a classroom computer. Next week, we’ll be discussing web-based solutions that can work in the classroom and I’m hoping to put together a list of solutions that will work even in a classroom with only one computer.

So far, I have the following solutions:

• Swiki (http://wiki.squeak.org/swiki/)–the first wiki I ever deployed. It has served us well for many years and can run on just about any old computer (Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Windows 2000-Vista).
• Tiddlywiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com)–a new favorite. This gem can be run from your local hard drive or uploaded to a server and served up over HTTP.
• MoinMoin desktop edition–This is a Python based wiki that is quite functional. I have not had a chance to use it much though.

What are you using for a standalone wiki engine?

Learning how to code. I like the word “coding” more than “programming”; code is poetry
My first efforts were writing some lines of code in PHP. Now I’m learning LISP. Why? Because it is the granddaddy of computer languages. But there is more: I’m not finished yet learning PHP, and I am doing some very small projects – for learning purposes only – in the Mono development framework.

Yesterday I stumbled on Wagn, “Ruby on Rails, Wiki on Wheels”. This “Explore, Organize, Thrive” CMS seems to me the best application for a new project I am planning for my work. (Don’t ask…).
But…I need some knowledge of Ruby on Rails, as well as Git. Hm, that’s all rather arcane to me, but everything can be taught, so I picked up a book from the Public Library “Handboek Programmeren met Ruby en Rails” (in Dutch) by Ivo Balbaert and followed some online lessons at the Ruby Programming Language Website, that led me to another hands-on tutorial, written by why the lucky stiff, whoever that may be, but he describes himself as

…a fledgling freelance professor, one who will die young and make no lasting impression.

Rather modest, IMHO, because besides his beautiful website he also blessed the world with a funny book Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby – completely free!

Okay, I downloaded the One-Click Installer and wrote my first line of Ruby; “Hello World”, or something like that. Let’s see if I’ll get Ruby rolling.

I saw Mike posting recently about how he is using TiddlyWeb with theTiddlyDocs and TiddlyGuv projects and I thought I would put something out about how we’ve been using TiddlyWeb with another Osmosoft project – the redesign of ILGA.org for the International Lesbian and Gay Association.

The ILGA project has taken our use of TiddlyWeb in unexplored directions. The essential problem that we’re using this system to solve is that we have a set of people around the world who wish to contribute content to a website, which is then stored and displayed to a visitor when they access the site. It is, simply, a CMS problem as solved a hundred times over by projects, public and private, around the world.

Chris Dent did not want to create a framework when creating TiddlyWeb , but with this is what he has done. With ILGA, we have been determined to push the limits of the system and expose new patterns of use and holes for further development.

The following describes how we’ve used TiddlyWeb to solve the problems of content-editing and publishing. The natural progression has been to work with a TiddlyWeb plugin, cheekily called “jinx”, when the existing toolset didn’t seem to be adequate. As you’ll see, revisions of our methods have used more and more of TiddlyWeb’s innards as we’ve gone along, showing what you can do with the system in its native form.

Accepting content from contributors

Where and how to publish

TiddlyWeb uses the concepts of “bags“, which are spheres of permissions, and “recipes“, which collect bags and pour out the tiddlers through filters. Tiddlers themselves do not have permissions assigned to them, which in a sense, helps you with your decision about where to let people put content. Each contributor gets their own bag, and anything that they contribute ends up in this bag.

In a finally enlightening cycle of development, we discovered that the connection between a recipe and the bags it references is implemented in a useful and elegant way: when you create a new tiddler and save it back to TiddlyWeb, it will end up in whichever is the first bag you have permission to PUT to, counting up from the bottom of the recipe. This means that if your own bag is the last line in the recipe, any new tiddlers will be assigned to that bag. A neat syntactical trick in creating the recipe can make it generic for any contributor:

recipe
   /bags/system/tiddlers
   /bags/common/tiddlers
   /bags/{{ user }}/tiddlers

This simple construction saved us large chunks of code that had been written as TiddlyWeb plugins before this mechanism was properly understood.

The TiddlyWiki as content manager

Although the pages that we wanted to show to site visitors had to behave like ordinary web pages, there is no such limitation on pages that the relatively small number of contributors use to edit and publish content, as they are effectively private. This allowed us to take advantage of the full power of TiddlyWiki as an editor and manager of the content in someone’s bag.

Draft vs. publish

One feature we added to the TiddlyWiki editor early on was a button to publish a piece of content. Initially, this involved a lot of custom code to handle PUTing an article, until the understanding of the bag and recipe concept outlined above encouraged us to use the default behaviour. Setting a flag on a tiddler that indicates which bag it comes from overrides the recipe-based bag selection and keeps publishing to different bags simple.

Displaying content to visitors

Now that we have content safely tucked up in bags, the question is how to get it out again for visitors to the site, outside of the shackles of a standard TiddlyWiki. This is because TiddlyWikis are not suitable as our ordinary web pages for reasons of accessibility, page size and search engine optimization. This has so far been the area most in need of attention and experimentation, as TiddlyWeb does not make content presentation as obvious as content saving.

Getting stuff out – recipes, filters and tiddler selection

[Update: this techniques described in this section continue to evolve, but I think it is worth posting this as it shows where we came from and does include some useful generic techniques.]

The complement to the content-storing bags mentioned above are the recipes, which deliver a filtered set of tiddlers that come from any number of bags. We’ve set each person up with their own bag to store their tiddlers. We found two difficulties with using recipes to deliver content:

1. You can’t dynamically add the title of a tiddler you’re looking for to a recipe, unless you have a single recipe for e.g. each news article. This means that our recipes deliver a large number of tiddlers, which then have to be filtered further in some way, either in the template or in the jinx plugin;
2. A further consequence is that the recipes get longer as you add more contributors, and have to be maintained. It would be easier to be able to point to all contributors’ bags in a recipe.

As mentioned above, further selection is required after a recipe has delivered a set of tiddlers. This is where the jinx plugin has been developed (and repeatedly re-worked!) the most. Because we can examine the URL requested in the plugin, there is an interdependency between the URL’s structure and the filtering applied to a set of tiddlers returned by a recipe. The URL structure itself is examined further down.

The scenarios we have for wanting to get content out of TiddlyWeb and the corresponding recipes and tiddler selection we’ve set up in the jinx plugin are:

• Pages with one news article (a tiddler tagged ‘article’)

recipe
   /bags/JON/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]]
   /bags/BOB/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]]
   /bags/PETER/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]]

selection
   get_tiddler_from_recipe(tiddler_name,recipe_name)

• Pages with many news articles

recipe
   /bags/JON/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]]
   /bags/BOB/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]]
   /bags/PETER/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]]

selection (no further filtering)
   get_tiddlers_from_recipe(recipe_name)

• Pages with country profile information (tiddlers tagged ‘countryprofile’ from a single contributor), news articles for that country, a tiddler defining themes for a map and a tiddler for the country itself

recipe
   /bags/countries/tiddlers?filter=JAPAN
   /bags/BOB/tiddlers?filter=[tag[countryprofile]]
   /bags/JON/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]location[JAPAN]]
   /bags/PETER/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]location[JAPAN]]
   /bags/BOB/tiddlers?filter=[tag[article]location[JAPAN]]
   /bags/ILGA/tiddlers?filter=[tag[maptheme]]

selection (no further filtering)
   get_tiddlers_from_recipe(recipe_name,named_tiddlers_array)

The final example, although still developing, illustrates how difficult it can be to get the tiddlers you need in a way that you can tell them apart. We added the second argument to the get_tiddlers_from_recipe function so that we could pass in tiddlers as named variables to the next step, HTML templating, and refer to them directly rather than iterating through a huge loop of tiddlers each time we wanted to find one.

Formatting stuff – templates

Right from the word go, we’ve wanted to “template” tiddler content through HTML templates, inserting bits and pieces of tiddlers into the relevant places in a mainly static page. The approach we’ve developed so far involves using the jinx plugin to map a particular URL path, say /articles/MyArticle, to a function that collects a set of tiddlers as described above (in this case probably “articles”) and pushes them through a templating process to generate the HTML pages.

A technique we’ve found ourselves using quite frequently is iterating through the delivered set of tiddlers to find the one we want. For example, on country page, we want to be able to isolate the tiddlers which are news articles. At the moment, we can do that like this:

{% for tiddler in tiddlers %}
   {% for tag in tiddler.tags %}
      {% if tag == 'article' %}
         <h2>{{tiddler.title}}</h2>
      {% endif %}
   {% endfor %}
{% endfor %}

This structure is less than ideal and it would be much easier to be able to access the groups of tiddlers directly, which is why the named_tiddlers_arrayparameter was created for get_tiddlers_from_recipe. However, this doesn’t feel very solid yet.

Accessing stuff – URL’s

The URL used to access a tiddler can be accessed and acted on by the jinx plugin, so we have used it to determine what is presented and how, through two methods: first, by mapping various URL structures to functions inside the jinx plugin; second, by using the sections of a URL’s path as variables in these functions, determining things like which template is used, or which tiddler is retrieved.

The mappings we are using are listed below. TiddlyWeb differentiates between/resource and /resource/, so there are double entries for most mappings:

config['selector'].add('/index.html', GET=get_index)
config['selector'].add('/myactivism', GET=get_myactivism)
config['selector'].add('/myactivism/', GET=get_myactivism)
config['selector'].add('/allies', GET=get_allies)
config['selector'].add('/allies/', GET=get_allies)
config['selector'].add('/article/{name:segment}', GET=get_article)
config['selector'].add('/countries/{country:segment}', GET=get_country_section)
config['selector'].add('/countries/{country:segment}/', GET=get_country_section)
config['selector'].add('/countries/{country:segment}/{section:segment}/', GET=get_country_section)
config['selector'].add('/countries/{country:segment}/{section:segment}', GET=get_country_section)

It seems that, in the pursuit of genericism, GET /path/to/resource should be understood as GET /path/to/recipe/tiddler - accessing a recipe, pushing the results through a template (perhaps with the same name as the recipe), and selecting the named tiddler.

1. El tiddler que tiene los estilos, incluyendo el de impresión, es MptwTheme
2. Lo que tiene que ver con la impresión viene después de media=”print”
3. Yo oculto (display: none;) las siguientes clases.

• .headerForeground
• .tagglyTagged
• .subtitle

Al darle nombre a un tiddler, no usar “%”. TiddlyWiki lo dejará pasar, pero el listado de tiddlers se truncará en éste y no se terminará de mostrar. Me dió mucha lata encontrar el problema.

Yesterday, we had a “code jam” at Osmosoft Towers, with the aim of releasing, at 6pm GMT, a polished and usable version of “MediaWiki Unplugged”.

MediaWiki Unplugged is a web application you run locally (in your browser), that downloads content from a MediaWiki, allows you to edit it and sync’s back. The idea, a collaboration between Globant and Osmosoft, is that you’d use this when your Internet connection is flakey or absent, or just to give you a bit of breathing time when composing edits. We did it and the results are here: http://mediawikiunplugged.com – the hashtag is #mediawikiunplugged.

from genglebienne's flickr stream

Here’s the ‘ting – it’s a bit shit. I mean, it works and everything, but it’s not something that we’re really PROUD of. This is a problem for some. For me, this is one of the progressive things we’ve done for a long time and, in my opinion, should set the precedent for how Osmosoft functions as a team. MediaWiki Unplugged might be rough; however, it is new, potentially very helpful and, fundamentally, THERE.

There’s a principle in Agile Development, which Google Code appears to have taken as its motto – “Release early, release often”. This is a scary thing for many people creating new things – there’s always something that can be improved or a problem to fix. The “sensible” way to release new things is to keep them hidden from view until they are polished to a perfect shine, then release to a triumphant fanfare in the form of a press release and flurry of feathery tweets. Sadly, this expectation of great consequence will turn out unmet, the carefully composed press release will go uncited and the tweetstorm will fail to materialise.

To mitigate against this disappointment and optimize your chances of making a big splash with your new stuff, I suggest you instantly adopt the practice of releasing early and often. Here’s why:

1. Other people might not care about the things you think they care about; and there’s a good chance they won’t care about the things you care about. When you’re developing early-stage stuff, this is really important – you give out your product and everyone starts to use it in ways you hadn’t imagined, they put up with the things you thought would kill the experience and they complain about things you’d overlooked. Get your stuff out there earlier, with your hypotheses in your head, and watch and learn as people surprise you.
2. If you let out something you’re not proud of (a software fart, perhaps), it gives you one helluva motivation to sort it out. There are few things more stimulating than criticism or the fear of criticism.
3. You’ll do a better job next time. The eternal feedback loop has commenced and it feels hard. That’s because you’re learning about what shape your things need to be before people will love them. You’d pay people thousands of pounds for this kind of information in the controlled laboratory of market research.

Back to MediaWiki Unplugged then: my ears are open. As are the ears of everyone in the Osmosoft/Globant team. Roll on the next version.

from genglebienne's flickr stream

[Globant CTO Guibert Englebienne took lots of photos and posted them to Flickr, along with a video of Jeremy talking about MediaWiki Unplugged as a TiddlyWiki application, another of himself talking about the day; he also set up a tumblr for the day]

I’m interested in what makes a group of independent, smart people work on a project together; and what makes such a project fizzle out or take-off. Open source projects are of the type where people are generally not being coerced into contribution by the firm hand of hard cash; and yet, there are many thriving open source projects around the world. I’m clearly being a bit software developer-focussed here, but examples of people working on projects together without an authority directing them are common in the form of volunteer groups, business startups and hobbyists.

The question of what fuels someone’s motivation to get into a project seems slightly different from what fuels their continued commitment to a project. This is illustrated by the number of times a pub conversation leads to a bunch of people having the intention to do some cool stuff, which then dissipates a day or two later with nothing really achieved.

Yes, wifi-enhanced nipple tassles are exactly what the world needs!

I suggest that the principle reason someone contributes to a project (when they have a choice about it) is because they feel that they are getting something from it that is useful to them for a reason outside of the project. In the ordinary course of things, it is normal to have wants that are individual to you – something that you see as helping you get what you want is going to be worth your while spending time on it.

That point leads me on to the suggestion that the principle difference between a group project that is vibrant and active, and one that dies, is that the people involved all extract some benefit from it. That is to say, the project is a common ground for the people involved in it. Returning to the case of open source projects, this could mean that someone sees the continued improvement of an aspect of a project as helpful to a contract they are working on, or a product they are trying to create. 

As (admittedly anecdotal) evidence of this as a principle, we might look at two things: first, the preference to get involved in niche projects; second, the forking of open source projects.

At the time of checking, the number of projects on SourceForge.net (a popular host of open source projects) is 173065. The vast majority of these are unheard-of, small projects, suggesting that they serve the needs of a minority. But that’s the point – people have quite individual needs and will create their own projects when this serves them best.

It is clear that a big project such as the Linux operating system or the Firefox web browser have a large number of people contributing to the project, but it looks unlikely that the contributions from people outside the paid core team are continuing and general-purpose. Instead, they are more likely to be contributions that change things so that the software is useful for that specific contributor.

This last point leads on to the question of forking open source projects. It’s in a developer’s nature to make customisations to software so that it serves their needs or the needs of their clients/customers as well as possible. Projects that recognise this build their cores so that they can support big or small customisations without the need for someone to maintain their own version of the core (this would be a fork). This often manifests itself as a plugin framework for the project (Firefox Add-ons, jQuery plugins).

To use an example close to my heart, I cite Jeremy Ruston’s early development of a plugin mechanism in the TiddlyWiki project:

The above may cast some light onto why wifi-enabled nipple tassels might be one of those pub conversations that, rightly, burns out rather quickly – much like a faulty wifi-enabled nipple tassel might.

Another Web-Based MindMap apllication, and again it is Collaborative, Mind42:

Isn’t 42 the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Well, in this case it means FOR TWO and indicates the collaborative character of mind42. Manage all your ideas, whether alone, twosome or working together with the whole world – collaborative, browser-based and for free.

The best way to make a MindMap is still by hand. Plain Treeware and a pencil or rather: a set of pencils. Here you see a SketchNote – not quite a Mindmap – by Esther Gons as published in “De Volkskrant” of 21 april 2009. It is an impression of the “TheNetWeb2009-Conference“.

More MindMap-style work by Esther Gons is at her website, especially the sketches she made for The nextWeb conference.
As mentioned in another article, a very special MindMap-tool is TheBrain. But, this application has now a free and a “pro”-edition. In the free edition they removed some of their most interesting features – so that made me moving away from The Brain experience.
An interesting attempt to replace the Brain and integrate MindMapping with another great non-linear tool for note-taking, TiddlyWiki, is VismoWiki by Jon Robson. Still Work in Progress, but it looks very promising – a really exciting development.

I’ve been keeping an online workbook for a few months now (early February was when I think I started writing in it). It’s publicly accessible at http://jnthnlstr.tiddlyspot.com. As the TiddlyWiki veterans amongst you will immediately recognise, I’m using TiddlyWiki as the vehicle for all the information in there – after nearly two years of working in Osmosoft, I’m finally using TiddlyWiki for something!

The point of this THING is to give me somewhere to write down what I’m doing as I do it. And to store information in the rather useful “tiddler” micro-content format TiddlyWiki uses, where each tiddler has a title, a body and some optional tags. This format encourages you to write in little chunks that you link between, which Jeremy often says is like the way some people’s brains work.

I’ve found as I’ve gone along using my workbook that some stuff gets written down in almost essay form as I splurge out ideas for systems; other times, I’m colleting together resources that get heavily tagged and interlinked.

I’ve developed the way the thing looks quite a bit since I started – the default tiddlers you see when you open the workbook, and the contents of the left-hand column menu have changed the most; and they continue to change. I’m thinking I might develop the thing even further so it functions a bit like an online portfolio…

I’d like your opinion about whether it would be interesting to see some of the longer tiddlers, such as a recent one about personal organisation, extracted onto this blog. I’ve done it once before, where a post called “Email to HTTP. Gimme. KTHXBAI.” came from this tiddler in the workbook. The thing is – I’d like to bring out some of the more interesting passages in the workbook, before they’re fully developed into demonstratable systems, but I don’t want to blog mind-flow nonsense that clogs up your RSS reader.

Let me know what you think, and please feel free to take a wander through the workbook!

Den egen lilla wiki

Jag har kanske mässat detta förut – men om du missat TiddlyWiki, så har du en hel liten värld att upptäcka.

TiddlyWiki är en ensam HTML-fil (hemsidesfil) som kan ändras av läsaren. Ungefär som wikipedia alltså – fast ändå inte.

Skillnaden är att TiddlyWiki är en egen wiki, en personlig wiki. Den är till för ditt “dokumentera huset”-projekt, eller din egen receptbok. Eller ditt få-ordning-på-tankarna-skrivande. Ja vauduvill!

Jag ska erkänna att det är lite nördskoj också. För visst är det imponerande med en HTML-fil som inte bara innehåller möjlighet för självmodifikation (dubbelklicka på en “tiddler”=textavsnitt för att modifiera den) utan dessutom är slickt animerad, har sökfunktion med taggar och dessutom en inbyggd blogg (kallad journal)?

Så här funkar det:

1. Ladda ned empty.html från TiddlyWiki.com (högerklicka empty.html och välj “Spara som”)

2. Dubbelklicka på empty.html från skrivbordet eller var du nu sparar ned filer

3. Lek och lär!

Mycket nöje!

Taggar: tips, tiddlywiki, wiki