Growing your local Swiki (was Re: performance questions)

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Sun Mar 18 04:21:30 UTC 2001


On Sat, 17 Mar 2001, Ned Konz wrote:

> On Saturday 17 March 2001 15:53, Tom wrote:
[snip]
> > to "Getting Started...".  Or, maybe, one could even have a whole
> > hypertext-based help system come with the image, with active links
> > that open utilities and do other things when clicked on.  Are there
> > any hypertext-based help systems for Squeak (yes, I know that
> > Scamper+Swiki could be considered something like that)?

1) ComSwiki definitely needs to tune itself for Scamper (and vice
versa). This is a little difficult given the generality of the format
ComSwiki accepts (essentially, arbitrary HTML), but the Search, edit,
etc. pages could be specialized easily (more on this below).

2) You can make hyperlinks of various sorts in arbitrary squeak
text. Check out the class commetn for TextAttribute. (cmd-6 is the magic
key, and there's a simple angle brack syntax for adding actions)

3) Not as handy for applications, but the Smalltalk system is well thought
of, imho, as a superb hypertext/media system. One fantasy I have is
reworking the tools so that not only Smalltalk source code and objects
benefit from this.

[snip]
> Are the Swikis growing? What needs to happen to make them more useful? It 
> would be simple to provide quick access from Squeak to a meta-swiki search 
> (like the translate and spell check choices already on the text menu). Would 
> that be enough?

I think one important piece is WebDav like support so that we can make
native Squeak tools first class Swiki editors. Another important piece is
some sort of caching/mirroring/dare I say it "p2p" protocol for
Swikis. Personal vs. collabortive (i.e., MySwiki notes, which I may or may
not share some of, vs. my controbutions to the Swiki) Swiki notes would be
nice.

I'll note that some of the SCAN/Gossip/Collage design seems applicable to
more general info sharing.

Anyhoo, more on this sorta thing to come...

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.





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