Enough frisbee, need to get a little work done this weekend. Need a good coffee shop with wifi and power on a Sunday.

Hmmm, really what I need to do is to finally get around to setting up a San Francisco WifiMug.

Which reminds me that I’m kind of unhappy with the current state of the WifiMug codebase (and it’s showing its age a bit, pre-Web 2.0!), guess I should research available Rails wiki software.

Though what I really should do is whip out that Wiki-meets-structured-data-creation-PlacesWiki I’ve been meaning to write.

But first I want to do a comprehensive survey of alternative wiki markups, the space has really fractured. Stikkit is doing good things with natural mark up, while Semantic MediaWiki steamrolls its way through the expressiveness sweet spot, and Google Code wiki has some interesting stuff going on.

But, um, um, um, I should write a new web browser and search engine to research wikis! Yeah, thats the ticket!

Phil kicked off a new round of testing for Atom 1.0, the results of which are now captured in the Atom wiki. (not to mention a few gentle nudges on Magpie’s lack of 1.0 compliance.)

All of which got me thinking, it would be exceptionally cool if someone made the FeedParser’s tests available on the Atom wiki using Ward’s FIT concept in a documented, reportable fashion.

Any takers?

I’m looking for something suitable for building out a FAQ, and docs site for Magpie. I’m disinclined towards MediaWiki because I’ve found Kwiki’s approach of using the filesystem for data storage a plus, and because I don’t anticipate a need for MathML support, or other such esoterica.

Currently leaning towards DokuWiki partially on the suggestive nature of the name (sounds like “documentation”), and partially on Harry’s 2004 SitePoint review. Possibly supplemented by Bamboo, which is a lot like a Hieraki for PHP.

Praise, disagreement, experiences, resources?

First mass unlock all the files with:

sudo rcs -u *,v

Then mass re-lock with:

sudo -u www-data rcs -l *,v

Hat tip to Nat for pointing out the problem.

update: Some notes on watching Jon Udell’s recording of a Jot demo.

• Looks like it would have been a good year to make it to Web 2.0, the bankers and MBAs are finally gone again, and we can get back to building interesting tools. (but cut it out w/ the damn lazlo applets, when I want to slow my browser to a crawl, I’ll go find an animation of Duke doing somersaults)
• Too small to see real details
• something we call “forms” with “fields”
• on wifimug I’ve been playing a little bit with similar ideas, but stopping short of creating a form concept instead relying on guessable/mungeable key-value pair mappings.
• openguides would benefit from inline structure creation like this. Is SocialText thinking about this at all? And if so could we get that contributed back to Kwiki?
• prevayler? (saw an exception, couldn’t tell what language.)
• Twiki, Moin Moin, PHPWiki? I don’t think so. Wonder what thats about?
• external datasources: rss digester (of course) but also xslt driven digester (not web services?). the salesforce demo is pretty compelling, the 2-way sync can’t be done w/ an XSLT digester, something else at work there.
• “intelligently federated data” – sweet phrase and a hard problem
• has a “lotus notes like flavor”, was thinking that myself. Enabling development by people “close to the data”.
• interesting to see other folks grappling with the “its an ASP, but there is custom development” issue.
• they missed (or avoided) jon’s question about once an org has allowed a 1000 custom apps to bloom through out their workflow/infrastructure how to cope/version/structure/remember. (aka “the lotus notes problem”)

  I see a bad case of “snowflakes” incoming. Similar but perhaps even worse then the problem you see currently in desktop “database development”.

• this is situated software.
• I think this is one of the tensions we’re struggling with right now in web development, doing more with less, and making space for emergent properties.

  Its not the route I’m going right now in the apps I’m building, and it certainly isn’t what anyone is asking for, but I can’t help but wonder if its a missed opportunity.

  No reason “loosely joined” has to apply only to your relationships external to your org. Drastically simpler interfaces and lower activation costs is a tradeoff with big ball of string, and tyranny of structurelessness.

• how does it handle new records? 10,000 records? 100,000 records?
• the game right now is simple tools, “collaboration primitives” with low skill theshold but powerful enough to get unexpected behaviours.