[kw-pm] wiki etc.

[Daniel R. Allen]

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Andrew Kohlsmith wrote:

> On Tuesday 06 July 2004 08:07, lloyd carr wrote:
> > This is not perl specific, but I see a real problem. Wiki, php-nuke, email
> > list, website, im, news feed, each seems to fit only part of the problem
> > of communication.
> > [...] what about one point of contact? Perhaps like a
> > docbook for messages. You create a tagged "message", send it to one point.
> > You could retrieve it in raw form or it could be degraded to legacy formats
> > as needed.
>
> AMEN BROTHER!

Testify!

So it seems the defacto point-of-contact, the common format, is web
output. Hyperlinks signify relations, and mailing lists are presented in
threaded form via mailman/whatever (side-note: has anybody installed and
used sympa, which is written in perl?  I've been meaning to find out how
it compares with mailman.)

Unfortunately html has lots of faults- automated parsing is often
tough; also, the web is often read-only, and when it's read/write, the
method for writing is not exactly uniform on different websites; also,
the web has no built-in time component so getting a good history is
often impossible; also, it's grossly inefficient to stream to the
masses.  It's to bad the web is so convenient, it's so inefficient...

> This is specifically why I dislike message boards (the *Nuke varieties) --
> they dillute the actual signal and mire it up in the noise of avatars,
> animated smileys, ads and "ratings".

Can I get another AMEN to that?  (although I don't mind ratings; for busy,
slashdot-like boards, browsing by ratings make them readable in human
time).  Anyway, Nuke boards are NOT designed for readability.  It seems
they're always too cluttered, even if you took away all of the above
distractions.

> My ideal system -- one which placates the newbies and keeps the
> grizzled vetrans in 7-bit ASCII heaven would be a *Nuke<-->mailing
> list gateway.  [...] The biggest problem in a *Nuke<-->list gateway
> is that *Nuke has no concept of threads.

Yep.  I looked into doing a list gateway for php-nuke.  Any two-way
solution starts to look messy (partly due to the nuke code.  yuck.)

The list I set up for the LUG is one-way, Nuke --> email list.  But,
it's a nice email list: it preserves senders' address, formats for 76
columns, displays hyperlinks as [1] references, and has a HTML version
as an attachment.  Implementation is a perl script that runs once a
day on the SQL database generated by phpNuke.  Pretty simple stuff.
Getting the other direction, email-list into PHPNuke, seemed much less
like fun.  :->

> The Wiki serves a different purpose but in my mind it should not be separate
> from the website; The Vexi project really blurred the line with their use of
> Podwiki; the wiki *is* the website, and it'd be trivial to have a
> freely-updatable section which doesn't interfere with the main "website"
> content since Podwiki handles access controls.  To me, Podwiki solves the
> website/wiki problem.  The whole idea of using a Wiki as a CMS for a website
> is great, IMO, since changes are automatically tracked as well.  :-)

Yes- changelogs are very nice.  If only I could get changelogs for
more of the web- people keep MOVING stuff without telling where it's
gone.  And the Wayback machine only sometimes helps.

If only the entire web were a wiki.  No, I'm not entirely serious, but
I'm not entirely joking either.

> Instant messaging for me is like IRC; it's fast communication.  Problem is
> that the signal to noice level is very low. [...]

I'm currently working for a (distributed) company that does most of
its day-to-day communication in IRC (SILC, actually; it's encrypted).
Because we're motivated to keep it so, the environment is high
signal-to-noise, and having automatic logs of meetings is very nice.

There are also bots in each channel, combination infobots and
chatterbots- so you can instruct them to tell somebody something the
next time they stop by; or keep track of URLs, or monitor
server-loads.

I wouldn't believe it works as well as it seems to...

> An RSS feed would be nice but to be honest I haven't found an RSS
> client app that stays out of the way.

Ditto.  I'm *this* close to writing my own, darnit.  My problem is that
often I don't just want a headline, I want to bring up a paragraph summary
without clicking anything.  Google News does it just right, IMO.

And not just for rss, but for webpages in general.  I suppose I could
use WWW::Mechanize to trawl websites I'm interested in and save changes
in a rolling logfile, but I'd be really surprised if that worked well.

> There are some RSS jabber bots but I haven't had the time to really
> investigate them.  Something that let you know what happened since
> last check would be a nice RSS type app, but it'd have to be
> per-user customizable.

Likewise, if you find one you like, please let us know.

> Anyway I've blathered on long enough; if you haven't guessed, I'm
> really happy with how the Vexi project has handled the mailing
> lists/cvs/bug tracker/website integration...

hm, bugs.vexi.org: "Database disconnected"... :-}

To bring this back to our group- since Lloyd's concerned with how
these fit together- my thought was that the website is a "filtered"
group resource, with the most important and publicly useful info, and
pointers to everything- the wiki, list, list archives, minutes/notes
from the meetings...

The wiki is self-organized (or unorganized, if that fails...) and
"less filtered" (anybody can filter/change whatever they like; but if
others don't like the changes, the archives are open as well).
Unfortunately, we don't currently have these set up for "push" access,
like an RSS feed.  Both could be- the wiki could have an RSS (or
email?) feed; and the website is in CVS, so if there was demand for
it, a list could broadcast whenever there were changes to the site.

The list and archives are even less filtered- anybody can join and post
on any topic, although spammers will get the boot pretty darn quick.
Currently the list is the only "push" medium for the group.

Woah, here's a weird idea- what if the website CVS and wiki both had
an "important update" flag- if the author of a change deemed a change
to be important, it would be automatically echoed to the mailing list.

Another one- each page on the website could automatically be linked to
a page on the wiki of the same name, for discussion.  Including
notes/slides from talks.  ...heck, we're running SSI, so the wiki page
could even be #included at the bottom of the regular page.

What if the mailing list archives were tied into that- editing
a post could resend it to the list, in the same thread.  :-)

> Bah.  "message boards" are the scourge of the internet...  Only
> beaten by the spammers...

I particularly love message boards that have been taken over by
spammers.  I've heard about bots that auto-edit wikis to add ads.
Yucky.

Thereby giving at least one reason why we *shouldn't* use any
of my weird ideas.

Hell dancing baby doesn't even rate third.  :-)

badgerbadgerbadger.com?

-Daniel

> -A.

--
"Use a different web browser. There are a number of significant vulnerabilit-
ies in technologies relating to the [Microsoft] IE domain/zone security model,
the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX."  - US CERT (US
Computer Emergency Readiness Team) - http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/713878