I just discovered an interesting project called "Add Your Own":
http://www.addyourown.com/
It's a wiki restaurant review system! They even have a rudimentary metadata
system for locations and restaurant types. Is it worth us plugging the OG
system to them?
One interesting thing their site does that ours doesn't is a summary view:
http://www.addyourown.com/neighborhood.php?nbh_id=13
I think this is a smart innovation. It would be nice to be able to do that
for a given category - see a list of all the nodes, with selected metadata
fields, in a tabular format. Maybe this is something I should have a go at,
since it's long overdue that I contributed some more code.
Ha! Someone's already mentioned us to them! Fantastic.
http://www.quicktopic.com/23/H/3pd3JmL66G6/p6.1
--
# Earle Martin http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EarleMartin
$a="f695a9a2176a7dd1618af6649896ee10f05ea986de18af6277e9a1d8ef4696644569a1d".
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join"",unpack"C*",$b;$c=~s/7/2/g;@b=split"",$c;foreach$d(@b){$e=hex(substr($a
,$f,$d));while(length($e)<8){substr($e,0,0)=0;}print pack"b8",$e;$f+=$d;}
I just came across Upcoming.org, which is "a collaborative event calendar,
completely driven by people like you. Enter in the events you're attending,
comment on events entered by others, and syndicate event listings to your
own weblog. As Upcoming.org learns more about the events you enjoy, it will
suggest new events you never would have heard about."
I don't know about the learning side of it, but one thing that's definitely
of relevance to us is that they offer RSS feeds of calendar events for
different cities. Here's their page about London:
http://upcoming.org/metro/uk/london/london/
I think if I can hack together some kind of aggregator plugin, this could be
a great thing to include with the guides to provide extra depth (and
an incentive to keep coming back).
--
# Earle Martin http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EarleMartin
$a="f695a9a2176a7dd1618af6649896ee10f05ea986de18af6277e9a1d8ef4696644569a1d".
"8ef46961ae1e64277e9896eea7d92ea8003e9a1d8ef4696f6950";$b="8ALB6AIA4.BA2";$c=
join"",unpack"C*",$b;$c=~s/7/2/g;@b=split"",$c;foreach$d(@b){$e=hex(substr($a
,$f,$d));while(length($e)<8){substr($e,0,0)=0;}print pack"b8",$e;$f+=$d;}
... the world's cruftiest CGI.
http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/tech/openpostcode/
I've started off with a few places, others can add as they see fit. If
anyone wants to take the code, prettify it, fix bugs, write
documentation, make it compliant with the latest fashion in HTML and
templating, host it somewhere, or knit it into a nice tea cosy, please do.
--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
One person can change the world, but most of the time they shouldn't
-- Marge Simpson
I had lunch with Gordon yesterday, and we were talking about OG (no surprise).
One comment he made was that for non-technical people using the guide as a
reference, there are a large number of placeholder pages, which is irritating as
in these cases there is precious little information on the page.
I remember some discussion on one of the lists, of tagging placeholder nodes
with a category. Also, I have had discussion on IRC and at london.pm social meets
about deleting nodes. An approach to this is to put them in "category deleted".
In both cases, we are talking about some implied filtering for the search and links.
They would both be selectable from user preferences: "show deleted pages",
"show placeholder pages".
Regarding links, this is a small change from how links are rendered at present,
to a tri-state:
1. Node exists, creates href link
2. Node does not exist, show hyperlinked '?' linked to edit page
3. Node exists but is suppressed (deleted / placeholder), don't link
Thoughts please.
Working on the search has caused me to mull on a particular problem:
Which searches will currently find "King's head"?
king Yes, ' is a non-word character which matches \b
kings No
king's Yes
I think ideally that we want the middle one to work also.
Then I thought of the epic "King's Cross St Pancras".
How many ways to write that one out?
And I realised that this is not just a search issue but a linking issue as well.
I recall the problem we had with "Regent's Park" and "Regents Park", which
has been worked around with a redirect.
Also, I'm wondering about having a list of standard abbreviations somewhere,
which gets applied in-line as part of the node_name_to_node_title munging:
ave => avenue
ct => court
gdns => gardens
hse => house
rd => road
st => street
st => saint ...oops!
This is the end of my braindump on this. I need input from others.
It will also be generating more test cases for the search :).
Ivor.
Hi, I'm Evil Dave. Some of you may remember me from flamewars such as
"Template Toolkit doesn't seperate presentation from logic" and
"Anti-virus vendors are as bad as spammers".
There was a discussion today on the #london.pm IRC channel about making
Openguides data available on PDAs. I think this is a Jolly Good Idea.
Being able to consult a database in my pocket for restaurant and pub
reviews would be most useful. Yes, there's Vindigo, but its pub
coverage is dire, and in any case, you need to be running Windows or
Linux to get it working, and all the cool kids these days are drinking
the OS X Kool-Aid.
So, I propose that I write a Palm application which encapsulates the
more important bits of Openguides functionality and which can be fed a
database, updated at regular intervals. I can start work on this once I
finish writing some phone stuff for the Palm which I've been sitting on
doing nothing for months.
There are plenty of other PDAs. However, Palm OS is the most common,
has the cheapest devices, and is also the most primitive. Therefore I
suggest targetting that platform first, and then writing front-ends for
other platforms if they are thought necessary, using the same database.
The format of Palm databases is well-documented and there are
libraries available for many platforms. Taking some other route would
not work, as Palm OS is so primitive that it *only* understands its own
database format. It does NOT play well with others.
Do we have any experienced Palm and/or C developers here? C is my
language is choice for working on Palm OS, mostly because perl isn't
available, the mini Java VMs are as buggy as very buggy things, and
Python - well, it's Python. Other languages available are BASIC, Lisp
and Forth. Forth isn't really suitable, my Lisp-fu isn't strong enough,
and BASIC sucks arse.
C also has the advantage that the tools are available for free. I use a
gcc m68k cross-compiler, and a bunch of free tools for building the GUI
front-end and linking everything right. The Palm OS Emulator is
available for free from Palm, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux,
and probably others. And it has the exceptionally nifty feature of
talking with gdb.
Such a project would require that the main Openguides project can supply
data, with a nice stable structure. It also requires that Openguides
people decide what functionality is important for such a tool and what
isn't. bear in mind the constraint that plenty of Palm devices only
have 4Mb of storage or less. This is used both for the running
application's heap and long-term storage of apps and data. We should
aim for a total size of no more than half a meg, and anything more than
a meg is Right Out.
So, errm, any thoughts?
--
David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
Perl may be the best solution for processing a text
file, but asking a group of Perl Mongers clearly isn't
-- aef, in #london.pm
A rather perceptive post, forwarded in full from the london.pm discussion.
Kake
----- Forwarded message from Simon Wilcox <essuu(a)ourshack.com> -----
From: Simon Wilcox <essuu(a)ourshack.com>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 15:07:15 +0100 (BST)
To: london.pm(a)london.pm.org.realprogrammers.com
Subject: Re: Call for Comments - OpenGuides and usability
On 22 Oct 2003, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> There are four kinds of people regarding Wikis:
I would argue that the technology is irrelevant, There are two kinds of
people who might interact with Open Guide:
1. Consumers
2. Producers
A successful site will make it easy for consumers to consume and producers
to produce. There will always be many more consumers than producers. A
*really* successful site will be able to convert consumers into producers.
Arguably Open Guide succeeds at none of these things as it only really
makes it easy for *producers* to consume as too much pre-knowledge is
required to understand and navigate the site and a lot of the early
information is aimed at producers.
But then, I guess it depends on what you define as "successful". Perhaps
we should ask that question - how will we know when Open Guide to London
is a success ?
Simon.
----- End forwarded message -----
The latest CVS of OpenGuides is failing 'Build test' - on
t/32_supersearch_simple_metadata.t
I backed out Ivor's last two changes in my sandbox
(lib/OpenGuides/SuperSearch.pm and t/31_supersearch.t) and the tests
pass again. Ivor, what happened?
Please can everyone with CVS access be careful *not* to check things
in until the tests are passing! Firstly, the CVS version should be in
a releasable state at any time. Secondly, anyone else wanting to work
on the code now has to fix the failing tests before they can do anything.
Kake
who wanted to work on the code
I wrote a little pub search thing for the London OpenGuide. Comments
welcome. Is this the kind of thing people would like to see on the site?
Here it is on my dev site:
http://un.earth.li/~kake/cgi-bin/pubsearch-alpha.cgi
Kake
I have made a call for comments on OpenGuides usability on the london.pm
list. The thread may be read here:
http://london.pm.org/pipermail/london.pm/Week-of-Mon-20031020/022237.html
Note that until london.pm.org's DNS issues are resolved, you will need to
amend the above to read london.pm.org.realprogrammers.com.
--
# Earle Martin http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EarleMartin
$a="f695a9a2176a7dd1618af6649896ee10f05ea986de18af6277e9a1d8ef4696644569a1d".
"8ef46961ae1e64277e9896eea7d92ea8003e9a1d8ef4696f6950";$b="8ALB6AIA4.BA2";$c=
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