[kw-pm] wiki etc.

[Andrew Kohlsmith]

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. We can automate the translation of one to the others, but
> has anyone looked at the messages and the channels themselves. So at kw.pm
> we now have a website, a wiki and a mailing list. We have each to serve a
> purpose. Some of what is on each should appear on the others. The mail
> comes to us, but the other two have to be checked when we think of it. We
> could add another channel, news feed? We could automate translation from
> one to the others, but 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!

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".  

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.  If 
you post to the mailing list, it appears in a forum (parsing out your 
username from your email settings and perhaps an "unverified" flag if your 
message wasn't GPG-signed)....  Similarly a post to a forum would generate a 
mailing list message with a similar parsing of the username and a 
sanitization of all but the "standard three" smileys and so on.  Archives 
would be kept in a normal mailbox-style file and the forums could search 
those, extracting "X-Forum-MsgID" tags or somesuch in order to keep 
everything in sync on a search.

The biggest problem in a *Nuke<-->list gateway is that *Nuke has no concept of 
threads.  It'd have to be hacked in, but I'd be happy keeping every new 
"topic" as a thread on its own; I think it'd be a workable solution.

Newsgroups are trivial to link to a mailing list.  Essentially that's what 
they are, only without the broadcasting to "subscribers".

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.  :-)

Instant messaging for me is like IRC; it's fast communication.  Problem is 
that the signal to noice level is very low... hell it's almost like trying to 
pick up a spread-spectrum signal withough knowing the sequence.  :-)  There 
are IRC logs and it's easy enough to do IM logs but generally speaking 
they're not worth it.

The Vexi project handles IRC/IM as an "out of band" signalling channel -- the 
developers hang there and chatter, sometimes work related, sometimes just 
socially as they work on their own...  but any major discoveries that are 
found get mailing list posts to inform everyone else.  It seems to work very 
well and the comraderie that IM brings really seems to keep things moving 
very smoothly.

An RSS feed would be nice but to be honest I haven't found an RSS client app 
that stays out of the way.  KDE has a nice panel applet but I tend to keep my 
taskbar on the left side of the screen 
(http://www.mixdown.ca/~andrew/dump/green.png -- and no, mustang.jpg is *not* 
my bedroom...  Leopard skin bedsheets aren't my style) so it's useless.  
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.

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...  all that's needed is a good *Nuke<-->mailing 
list gateway (someone posted an attempt at kwlug, I forget how it actually 
worked, I think it was one-way only)...

Bah.  "message boards" are the scourge of the internet...  Only beaten by the 
spammers...  Hell dancing baby doesn't even rate third.  :-)

-A.