BozPages on SWiK

Wikiality

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 01:55:06 -0700

I’ve been working on a wiki project as an experiment for the next generation of SWiK.

The concept is that the web isn’t just a lot of static webpages anymore, it’s Ajax widgetry, Flash videos, fancy stylesheets, etc. Wikis however are dragging behind, stuck in static webpage land, there either isn’t a model for extending the wiki, or if there is it’s too complicated to really be ‘wiki’.

The wikiality concept tries to play a balance between these worlds. It’s a very experimental concept, but I’ve started using it personally and I think it’s started to be interesting. The way it works is via two types of pages: wiki pages and wiki templates.

The templating language is straight JavaScript. Templates are wiki pages that contain an eponymous Javascript class. When templates are embedded in a wiki page, the page then incorporates any referenced templates.

I like building applications in wiki form because:

It’s faster to develop, about two times as fast as a regular application
More customization. If I don’t like how something works in a widget, I can clone the widget, change it subtley, and now I have it working both ways. You can also build your own interface from top to bottom, there’s no constraints of the standard application ui.

I’ve written some applications in wikiality:

Bozpages 2.0 – This is the successor to Bozpages (simple rss feed pages).
- bozpage web2.0
- bozpage tech news
Video Bookmarks – Like delimages shows you the most recently bookmarked image feeds from del.icio.us, Video Bookmarks shows the most recently bookmarked videos from YouTube and Google Video.

I’m still thinking about how the concept works and it’s very experimental and in flux, but I thought I’d share just the basic idea: I think wikis and widgets can work together.

PS. I’ve been looking more into how Digg works, and how the user ecology is evolving, I posted this on my other blog, but I think it might be interesting to people who just read this one, It’s called “The Prisoner’s Dilemma In Digg Story Promotion”. It talks about a theory I’m working on that there might be a weakness in Digg’s story promotion scheme wherein you can get your stories front-paged by entering into a cooperative game with other people trying for the same thing.

Service Outage

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 22:53:19 -0800

we had a service outage tonight—ran out of the disk space, oops!

turns out that apache logs get big quickly when you are doing a lot of ajax requests

mysql doestn’ appreciate not having any disk space, so table done got corrupted

table is repaired, service is up again, yay….

Problems with Tooltips-dot-js

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:34:50 -0800

Tooltips.js is annoying me a bunch, not sure if anyone else has the same problem, but the hovers for the posts don’t really wrap correctly on the page.

If anyone knows what library I should be using instead to do these hovers, please let me know, I really don’t want to have to do my own, and trying to fix Tooltips.js has proven to be non-trivial.

Stay classy

New Feature - Aggregate RSS feeds

Mon, 12 Dec 2005 16:29:11 -0800

Now you can subscribe to a River as an RSS feed.

(append &format=rss to the url)

New Feature - See the discussion

Fri, 09 Dec 2005 14:06:01 -0800

If you notice on River View, below popular posts now you can see the discussion on the web around that post.

The Cloud View has been upgraded to give better clouding on certain BozPages.

Down again - damn gremlins

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:07:25 -0800

Arg LiveMarks is down again, someone call the bloglines plumber

This goes for priv.at and bozpages too dagnabit

Again – Colo drive required to fix – stay tuned.

Update: up again, that was quick – and a total mystery :/

New Feature - River View

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 20:05:09 -0800

Now you can have a view of the river. Click on ‘River View’ to see all the posts flow on by ;)

New Feature - Rollover Descriptions

Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:48:39 -0800

Hover over a title to see the post description in more detail.

This is powered by the JavaScript library wz_tooltip. There is a known issue, in that really big entries can overflow the top of the screen. If someone has a fix for the wz_tooltip library, send it my way, otherwise stay tuned for me to fix it…

New Feature - Cloud View

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:22:52 -0800

You can now see all the links in rss feeds in a ‘Cloud View’

RSS Overload? Trying the Web Way Again.

Wed, 16 Nov 2005 18:47:34 -0800

Something I’ve been thinking about is the way I use my blog reader, and how it’s transformed the way I use the web.

In many ways it’s great to have information delivered to me on my terms. In a lot of the reading I do online, I don’t ever leave the RSS reader.

However there are problems with reading a lot of feeds, which makes me start to think maybe I need to rethink the classic model of RSS reading – create your blogroll and watch all the posts as they come in.

I’ve found myself often in a quandary about adding a feed to my blog reader. It’s already so choked with feeds that I constantly have to play gardener, pruning and trimming to make sure that I don’t get overloaded. (I almost always am anyways).

OK so a bunch of geniuses think they can solve my problem with blog overload by only finding me the ‘relevant’ posts.

Except that doesn’t work, that sucks. Taking management of my information consumption away from me is bad. Unless Google Reader is plugged into my subconscious, how will it really know what I want to read?

OK so here’s my solution for adding a zillion feeds. Add them to different blogrolls. I now maintain 5 blogrolls. I visit them in varying frequencies:

Main Blogroll: anything that must be paid attention to. Bloglines nicely tracks for me what I’ve read. (Although I can’t keep it open anymore because their new JavaScript code breaks the entire page if I leave Bloglines open for too long, damn I hate Bloglines atm).
FriendsRoll: Friends’, People I know or just think are cool lists of Bookmarks (del.icio.us feeds), Pictures (flickr feeds), and personal weblogs.
Vanity Search: Who’s talking about me on the web. I like the idea of loosely coupled conversations over the web, posting comments and replies on personal blogs instead of in comments, but it’s still hard to keep track of who is talking about you. Also a single blog search rarely covers the entire blogosphere, so I use 4 engines: google blogsearch, feedster, icerocket, and blogpulse and subscribe to them all. (technorati obnoxiously doesn’t offer public RSS feeds)
NewsRolls: I keep various news blogrolls, for entertainment. World News, Games News, Ajax News – all get their own blogrolls.

With many blogrolls, I don’t have to worry so much about overloading my queue of things to read every day. The question is: how do you keep a bunch of blogrolls? Well since there isn’t an easy way in Bloglines, Google Reader, or any other reader I could see, I rolled my own blogreader: BozPages.

It’s dead simple. Add a feed, make a blog roll, that’s it.

By the way, hearing about OPML at Seattle MindCamp really impressed on me of the usefulness of it. I have had generally a pretty negative opinion of OPML as people talking about it have made it seem too semantic-web-ey. Also it shoves data in xml attributes, and it’s of much less obvious use than RSS, but so far as having a standard format for blogrolls, it’s awesome.

I sometimes use BozPages as a kind of OPML viewer. I subscribe someone’s feeds to a BozPage, and then I can check out what the world looks like from their perspective. Unfortunately, OPML discovery is still in its infancy, people often don’t know and don’t publish their OPML feed urls. It’s too bad because there’s a lot of cool things that could be done if you could see who’s subscribing to you and who is subscribing to them and so on.

BlogSearch Bozpage

Sat, 25 Feb 2006 19:29:04 -0800

You can create a blog search BozPage

This will aggregate various blog search engines for a specific term

Feature Requests

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 11:15:50 -0800

If you have a feature you’d like to see in BozPages – add it to the list

Search template on the front page – (Byron)
~~XML link on each feed – (Byron)~~ done
Quick Search feed add widget
~~Not a really a feature inside BozPage but a simple link on the web page where to download a tarball of BozPages or a cvs link to check out the current version.~~ done – see how bozpages works
Name a page –

How BozPages Works

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 11:43:22 -0800

Bozpages is fairly simple, users create pages that are associated with rss feeds.

In order to not require registration, pages are never destroyed or changed, instead a new version of the page is made on every page change.

Projects used

Source Codes

Source code can be found in these files:

Database structure

-- Database: `bozpages`
--

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `bozpages`
--

CREATE TABLE `bozpages` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `hitCount` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
 `hash` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
 PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
 KEY `hitCount` (`hitCount`),
 KEY `hash` (`hash`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=8484 ;

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `feeds`
--

CREATE TABLE `feeds` (
 `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
 `url` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
 PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
 UNIQUE KEY `url` (`url`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=4042 ;

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `feeds_for_page`
--

CREATE TABLE `feeds_for_page` (
 `feed_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
 `boz_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
 `linkedDate` timestamp NOT NULL default CURRENT_TIMESTAMP on update
CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
 KEY `feed_id` (`feed_id`),
 KEY `boz_id` (`boz_id`),
 KEY `linkedDate` (`linkedDate`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1;

-- --------------------------------------------------------

News

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 22:21:48 -0800

News about BozPages