OpenGuides-Dev October 2003

openguides-dev@lists.openguides.org

7 participants
14 discussions

[OpenGuides-Dev] A similar effort
by Earle Martin 22 Apr '04

22 Apr '04

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 $a="f695a9a2176a7dd1618af6649896ee10f05ea986de18af6277e9a1d8ef4696644569a1d". "8ef46961ae1e64277e9896eea7d92ea8003e9a1d8ef4696f6950";$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;}

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[OpenGuides-Dev] Upcoming.org
by Earle Martin 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

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;}

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[OpenGuides-Dev] I am the god of postcodes, and I bring you ...
by David Cantrell 28 Oct '03

28 Oct '03

... 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

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[OpenGuides-Dev] special category filtering
by Ivor Williams 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

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.

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[OpenGuides-Dev] Synonyms abbreviations and apostrophes
by Ivor Williams 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

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.

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[OpenGuides-Dev] Openguides/PalmOS - and an introduction
by David Cantrell 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

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

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[OpenGuides-Dev] More on the accessibility thing
by Kate L Pugh 23 Oct '03

23 Oct '03

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 -----

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[OpenGuides-Dev] Test failures
by Kate L Pugh 23 Oct '03

23 Oct '03

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

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[OpenGuides-Dev] Re: Call for Comments - OpenGuides and usability
by Kate L Pugh 22 Oct '03

22 Oct '03

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

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[OpenGuides-Dev] Usability comments
by Earle Martin 22 Oct '03

22 Oct '03

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";$c= join"",unpack"C*",$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;}

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OpenGuides-Dev October 2003