Digest 2014-11-12

Welcome to the federated wiki hangout for November 11, 2014

On today's call

  • Ward (in Oregon)
  • Per (in Finland)
  • David (in Toronto)
  • Paul (in the UK)

David started talking about dissertation writing on Mashups
  • QEDWiki

IBM Damia had boxes and pipes

Ward instead had an idea of pages coming into an address space
  • Looking to the left, to pull data forward, and creating a left to right flow
  • Can hop over pages, but generally, the flow of information is left to right
  • Could do a lot with that
  • Choices:  could see as menu picking, but there's a dynamic model

Original model is command line
  • Pipeline programs
  • Interpreters

Hope to have a strong end user community in federated wiki
  • Mike Caulfield tends to write text
  • Michael Mahaffy, it's all about calculations

Clay Shirky's article on situated software http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html

Ward's metabolic calculator http://fed.wiki.org/view/metabolic-equivalent-of-task/view/metabolic-calculator
  • Two parts:  data set, and Javascript program on metabolic calculator
  • Uppercase letters are commands
  • Connection is made in the browser

Federated wiki more as platform, which has slowed growth
  • In retrospect, had written principles for Splash

Taoism and waiting for nature

Competitive open standards?
  • In early days, industry was making add-on disk drives, and IBM made the interface open
  • Strategic
  • Played over and over

Microsoft opened up .NET today
  • .NET is more open than Java, when Oracle is involved?

David's next case is writing up OpenOffice through the IBM involvement to Apache

Mike Caulfield is now writing a daily journal in federated wiki http://journal14.hapgood.net:3000/journal-for-2014.html
  • It's like a blog post that isn't finished:  he could use this content for later blog posts

Code shift last week?
  • Released the Express 4 version
  • Opens door for more work on the server

In issues, suggestions of a lot of things to be done
  • Testing server found client side bugs, too

Some things disappeared, or we never really had it?
  • Being able to revert to an earlier version of a page?  Can't remember if this worked on the node version, at least a year ago, probably was the Sinatra version

Machinery is to take a whole page, and write it
  • Was looking at this when it was in browser local storage, and wanted to fork it back onto host

Local databases:  anything supported by HTML5 still has cross-browser issues
  • Use Couchbase to sync in the background?
  • Then would have a shared local storage?

If hosted by a farm, would expect to be able to move things across the farm
  • Mike Caulfield is hosting a farm
  • Sign into a farm, and then have pages served at the farm level?

Mechanism to do cross-origin reads, but haven't done cross-origin writes
  • Log into any federated wiki, and then be able to move across origin sites
  • More "home" than "origin"
  • WebID and some data to associate self
  • If something in the wrong place, and it's not convenient to go from wrong to right place, could be nice to have a cache somewhere
  • Command line cp (!)

Mike Caulfield has a friend hosting
  • A version of federated wiki that checks every 10 minutes, and checks into Github
  • Then a student can take his work with him

Underdevelop support for wiki farms?
  • Want to make sure that what you want to do could be spread over 100 servers.
    • Industry is going the other way

Federated wiki in a mobile world?
  • On a tablet, wouldn't be doing much writing
  • Could we better support downloading a readable version of federated wiki?

Federated wiki as a static site?
  • If was reading on a tablet, could there be a "download this wiki site" onto the tablet?

Archive.org does save fed.wiki.org
  • Behavior is the same as when Javascript is turned off in browser

Should subscribe to the key repos
  • wiki-client
  • wiki-node

There's a query to find who's writing where

Look at issues in Github
  • Maybe 40% gets done ... and 60% in the long term

Original Smallest Federated Wiki had speculative issues
  • More likely to get response, as more people follow that

Otherwise, fixes are in the repos

How to do put a plain HTML access URL into wiki?
  • Follows wiki conventions with single and double square brackets
  • Crawler friendly?  Single page?  At the bottom of each page is a link to the page name, can use it for a friendly link address
  • If Javascript is turned on, then the multiple panes show up; otherwise it's a single pane

Paul is working on CouchDB

Embrace Docker?  
  • Had that with Ruby version

-- call ended --

Here's the transcript from the Google Hangout chat

me
13:00
I've started an Etherpad at http://pad.s2t.org/p/2014-11-12
Paul Rodwell joined group chat.
Ward Cunningham muted Per Johansson.

me
13:09
I've started an Etherpad at http://pad.s2t.org/p/2014-11-12

Ward Cunningham
13:15
http://fed.wiki.org/view/metabolic-equivalent-of-task/view/metabolic-calculator
Original wiki was about creating a pattern literature of programming.
Federated wiki is more a platform and that has slowed its growth.
http://splash.fed.wiki.org/view/welcome-visitors/view/splash-2014/view/federated-wiki-design-principles
Journal for 2014
Stephan Wittwer joined group chat.

Ward Cunningham
13:28
http://journal14.hapgood.net:3000/journal-for-2014.html
Stephan Wittwer left group chat.

me
13:38
I've started an Etherpad at http://pad.s2t.org/p/2014-11-12
David Barbour joined group chat.
Per Johansson left group chat.
Per Johansson joined group chat.

Ward Cunningham
13:46
http://ward.federatedwiki.org/own-a-space.html

Per Johansson
13:48
Good night all.
Per Johansson left group chat.

David Barbour
13:54
No mike, sorry.
KS

me
13:54
I've started an Etherpad at http://pad.s2t.org/p/2014-11-12
Michael Phelps joined group chat.
Michael Phelps left group chat.

David Barbour
13:59
Speaking of archive, would it be possible to add a plain-HTML access URL?
Ah, sorry. Meant for supporting crawl-friendly version of site.

Ward Cunningham
14:01
http://code.fed.wiki.org/coding-portfolio.html

David Barbour
14:02
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://code.fed.wiki.org/coding-portfolio.html - nothing
Bye
Paul Rodwell left group chat.
David Barbour left group chat.