OWL Fix

There's a big fix for OWL today. There were some mysterious times when pages that I thought I was changing were getting reverted. I thought originally that this was a glitch from me btsync-ing between my laptop and tablet. Or maybe my attempts at doing background synchronization between the browser localStorage and the server were failing.

Nothing seemed to completely eliminate this intermittent problem. But today I realized it was much simpler. I was basically using web.py's "static" file serving to pull the OPML files off the server into Concord. But "static" is meant for static files (doh!). The browser was caching them. (Maybe because of some header web.py was putting out.) Anyway, I just changed the server to reading the files into memory and spitting their contents out, just like any other dynamic web-page, and the problem looks like it's gone away.

I'll keep an eye out, but I think that was it.

OWL Server

OWL now has a simple Python server that saves OPML files to your local machine.

More here.

Introducing OWL

I love outlining. I love wiki. What do you get when you create a mutant cross-breed of the two?

A fucking power tool, that's what!

It's just a rough draft, at the moment, a rough mashup of Concord and ideas from SdiDesk. But I think you can see it's compelling ...

Dave open-sources his Outliner

Concord is Fargo open-sourced.

Dave is, of course, awesome.

Cthulhu

My software is more or less like Cthulhu. Normally dead and at the bottom of the sea, but occasionally stirring and throwing out a languid tentacle to drive men's minds insane. (Or at least perturb a couple of more recklessly adventurous users.)

However there's been a bit more bubbling agitation down in R'lyeh recently. The latest weird dream returning to trouble the world is GeekWeaver, the outline based templating language I wrote several years ago.

GeekWeaver was basically driven by two things : my interest in the OPML Editor outliner, and a need I had to create flat HTML file documentation. While the idea was strong, after the basic draft was released, it languished. 

Partly because I shifted from Windows to Linux where the OPML Editor just wasn't such a pleasurable experience. Partly because GW's strength is really in having a templating language when you don't have a web server; but I moved on to doing a lot of web-server based projects where that wasn't an issue. And partly, it got led astray - spiralling way out of control - by my desire to recreate the more sophisticated aspects of Lisp, with all kinds of closures, macros, recursion etc.

I ended up assuming that the whole enterprise had got horribly crufty and complicated and was an evolutionary dead end.

But suddenly it's 2013, I went to have quick look at GeekWeaver, and I really think it's worth taking seriously again.

Here are the three reasons why GeekWeaver is very much back in 2013 :

Fargo

Most obviously, Dave Winer has also been doing a refresh of his whole outlining vision with the excellent browser-based Fargo editor. Fargo is an up-to-date, no-comprise, easy to use online OPML Editor. But particularly important, it uses Dropbox to sync. outlines with your local file-system. That makes it practical to install GeekWeaver on your machine and compile outlines that you work on in Fargo.

I typically create a working directory on my machine with a symbolic link to the OPML file which is in the Fargo subdirectory in Dropbox and the fact that the editor is remote is hardly noticable (maybe a couple of seconds lag between finishing an edit and being able to compile it).

GitHub

What did we do before GitHub? Faffed, that's what. I tried to put GeekWeaver into a Python Egg or something, but it was complicated and full of confusing layers of directory.  And you need a certain understanding of Python arcana to handle it right. In contrast, everyone uses Git and GitHub these days. Installing and playing on your machine is easier. Updates are more visible.

GeekWeaver is now on GitHub. And as you can see from the quickstart guide on that page, you can be up and running by copying and pasting 4 instructions to your Linux terminal. (Should work on Mac too.) Getting into editing outlines with Fargo (or the OPML Editor still works fine) is a bit more complicated, but not that hard. (See above.)

Markdown

Originally GeekWeaver was conceived as using the same UseMod derived wiki-markup that I used in SdiDesk (and now Project ThoughtStorms for Smallest Federated Wiki). Then part of the Lisp purism got to me and I decided that such things should be implementable in the language, not hardwired, and so started removing them. 

The result was, while GeekWeaver was always better than hand-crafting HTML, it was still, basically hand-crafting HTML, and maybe a lot less convenient that using your favourite editor with built-in snippets or auto-complete.

In 2013 I accepted the inevitable. Markdown is one of the dominant wiki-like markup languages. There's a handy Python library for it which is a single, install away. And Winer's Fargo / Trex ecosystem already uses it. 

So in the last couple of days I managed to incorporate a &&markdown mode into GeekWeaver pretty easily. There are a couple of issues to resolve, mainly because of collisions between Markdown and other bits of GeekWeaver markup, but I'm now willing to change GeekWeaver to make Markdown work. It's obvious that even in its half-working state, Markdown is a big win that makes it a lot easier to write a bigger chunks of text in GeekWeaver. And, given that generating static documentation was GeekWeaver's original and most-common use-case, that's crucial.

Where Next?

Simplification. I'm cleaning out the cruft, throwing out the convoluted and buggy attempts to make higer-order blocks and lexical closures. (For the meantime.) 
  
Throwing out some of my own idiosyncratic markup to simplify HTML forms, PHP and javascript. Instead GW is going to refocus on being a great tool for adding user-defined re-usable abstractions to a) Markdown and b) any other text file.

In recent years I've done other libraries for code-generation. For example, Gates of Dawn is Python for generating synthesizers as PureData files. (BTW : I cleaned up that code-base a bit, recently, too.)

Could you generate synths from GeekWeaver? Sure you could. It doesn't really help though, but I've learned some interesting patterns from Gates of Dawn, that may find their way into GW.

Code Generation has an ambiguous reputation. It can be useful and can be more trouble than it's worth. But if you're inclined to think using outlining AND you believe in code-gen then GeekWeaver is aiming to become the perfect tool for you.

Fargo For LinkBlogging

I'm a couple of days into LinkBlogging using Fargo, (at Yelling At Strangers From The Sky) and I have to say, I'm getting into the swing and it's great.

If you keep the outline open in a tab, it's about as fast and convenient to post to Fargo as posting a link to Plus or Twitter. (Which is where traditional blogs like WordPress / Blogger often fall short). In fact, G+ is now getting bloated that it can take 10 seconds just to open the "paste a new message" box. It's a lot faster than that.

It would be nice if it could automatically include a picture or chunk of text from the original page the way FB / G+ do, that's turned out to be a compelling experience for me, but it's a nice not must-have.

A question, is there any kind of API for the outline inside the page which a bookmarklet could engage with? (Is that even possible given the browser security model?)

Fargo and Google

Couple of quick notes :

1) I'm too dependent on Google. Unlike the case of Facebook, I can't just cancel my account. Google is too deeply entwined with my life. But I am taking steps to disengage if not 100% at least a significant chunk.

2) I'm playing around a bit more with Dave Winer's Fargo outliner. And it is shaping up to be excellent, both as an outliner and expression of Winer's philosophy. (No surprises.)

So, to combine the two, I'm documenting my Google-leaving thoughts in a public outline. Check it out.

Update : I've also been wondering about having a linkblog, somewhere I can quickly throw links rather than G+ (which is inside the Google Walled River). Maybe Fargo will help there too.

Winer's Back!

This is really good news.

Dave Winer finally comes out with a decent outliner in the browser.

I've been looking for one for a long time. (Thought of trying to write it too, but it's not my speciality. Now you get one from the world's biggest Outlining evangelist.)

This is also great news for Winer himself, I think. As always, he has a lot of crucial ideas for where the web should be going. But for a while it's seemed like the main thing holding him back has been a code-base that's a Windows desktop application. (Which is NOT where either users or developers want to party these days.) The few times I've thought I'd like to look into the open-sourced Frontier / OPML Editor I've been put off by that.

A new browser-based UI (and Javascript-based server?) hopefully means that he'll be able to get more people involved in his code, interacting with his services, and start to have an impact via technology as well as evangelism.

And me, I'm holding on for the OPML export / import ... ahem ... cough ...  GeekWeaver ... cough. ;-)

Programming With A Mind Map

Using a MindMap to store documentation.

Actually it sounds like Freemind is much like an outliner, in that you can drive it with the keyboard and collapse / expand etc.

I wonder how using this compares to LEO.

(Hat-tip Other Michael)

ThinkLinkr, another pretty slick web-based outliner.

The Smart Disorganized reboot is still in progress ....

Today, a sad story about GeekWeaver.

A couple of weeks ago I needed to revamp Gbloink!'s web presence. Quickly. And, I was in no position to do it in GW. So I fired up a copy of WordPress and made : Gbloink!

I also needed a new OPTIMAES site. And one for Gisel.

You spot the trend? The answer to "how do I knock up a decent-looking site? fast?" is to use WordPress. I'm seriously thinking of doing it for my own homepage too.

Obviously, these are the kinds of scenarios for which I envisaged GeekWeaver. So what's gone wrong?

Several things :

- I got over-ambitious. The basic GeekWeaver as templating language, worked great. But I wanted to make it into a full sophisticated Lispish sort of a functional programming language. That side-tracked me into several attempted rewrites before I shelved it with other unfinished projects.

- The OPML Editor worked great in Windows XP. But was horrible in Vista. And now I'm using Linux most of the time. I can run it under Wine, but it feels clunky to do so. So I don't have a decent OPML editor. There are still, surprisingly few outliners in Linux, and still no convenient outline editing widget for the browser.

- Great templates are the real win. An earlier version of GeekWeaver shipped with decent free template I got from somewhere or other. But I'm not a good HTML / CSS designer and I could neither adapt it to my changing requirements nor really design another. I guess the answer is to work with a designer. But as one of the proposals for GW was to make web-design more "programmer-friendly" (by introducing the programmer's favourite tool, abstraction, to HTML) that's rather a contradictory point. Chalk one up to web-designers and one against GeekWeaver.[1]

- Moreover, it's hard to compete against a rich ecosystem like WordPress. Among thousands of templates and plug-ins from dozens of contributors, are some pretty damned good ones.

- Also, while GW had a couple of sprinkles of syntactic sugar to make authoring XHTML / XML in the outliner a rather pleasant experience, the outliner is merely OK for CSS and not really all that good for javascript. (For a real programming language, it's useful to have the standard syntax checking, bracket counting, line numbering etc.) As web-pages are increasingly made of CSS and javascript over and above the HTML, GW is decreasingly useful. To do GW properly, the editor needs to be both a good code-editor AND a good outliner.

So is GeekWeaver a failure? Am I abandoning it?

Well, it's not yet a success, I'll agree. :-)

I still *believe* that there's a niche for a GeekWeaver-like language : something with the quick and dirty characteristics of early Perl or PHP; that let's you get a lot done quickly; and who's philosophy is "templating" at a granularity above the individual page or file. There's no reason that, if I had time and another burst of interest, I might not make further progress taking GeekWeaver in that direction.

But I now have a (more than) full-time day-job writing social software in Python[2] which leaves little time (or inclination) for a lot more experiments in python for web-site making. So GW is definitely on hiatus while I pursue other projects.

Nevertheless, I'm always coming back and thinking what I should do with it. You never know when inspiration might strike again.

[1] This raises another sceptical doubt. Allowing you to define abstractions is meant to make things easier. If it doesn't make "web-design" easier, am I barking up the wrong tree?

[2] In fact, I'm working with Django. Which brings a lot of other concerns and ideas. It was easy to see how GW could compile down to PHP. But would it make sense to try to compile it down to Django?

I think TidyLines is the best browser-based outliner I've seen. At least in terms of how it feels at the keyboard.

Dynamic List is a browser-based outliner.

Dave Winer back on Instant Outlining.

Would certainly be interesting if there was some movement on this. And some development of the OPML outliner in this direction.

It's the 40th anniversary of the original Engelbart demo.

Dave Winer's back on the Windows OPML Editor ... which is great for me and for GeekWeaver ('cos I don't have a Mac and there's no Linux port yet.)

Meanwhile ... anyone know other decent OPML editors? I'd be particularly interested in ones that run in the browser.

Smart Disorganized Philosophy #1

I've been on a Smart Disorganized Individuals tip for several years, now. Always writing software compatible with that philosophy.

But what is the philosophy? What does this software mean?

In this series I'll start to make some specific notes towards that. Here's the first.

SdiDesk is wiki : a network of texts.

GeekWeaver is a programming language written in an outliner : a hierarchy.

Mind Traffic Control is a multi-user, dynamic queue, a "flow" of tasks.

Each is SDI. Each is completely different. Each is for specific purpose.

SdiDesk excels at capturing ideas and the relationships between them that are static.

Outlines excel at authoring or creating structure which is ultimately intended for a reader.

Flows excel at capturing change and movement.

OTOH, each is bad for something. These are true, even if you might imagine them not to be.

Wiki is surprisingly bad for authoring. Outliners are surprisingly bad for managing todo-lists. Flows are a surprisingly bad place to put ideas that you want to keep forever.

Wiki is great for writing, but awkward for the kind of reworking and structuring needed to polish a document for an external audience.

Outliners fail to match the dynamism of shifting tasks and priorities in the real world. They focus on making a structure of something which needs little structure.

MTC will lose your ideas when they are no longer in the future.