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Bystroushaak

Personal wiki / information manager

Hello.

Is there any software projects/libraries for personal wiki (something
like ZIM or CherryTree or Orgmode for writing texts/notes) and personal
information managing in Pharo?

I think that Pharo would be great for this kind of software, because it
would provide rich scripting options. Also the idea of representing
informations as objects is really great.

For example; now I keep list of books I read in DSV file. With this SW,
I could have a list of objects representing the books, which could be
sorted or rendered to lower level protocols, like DSV/XML/whatever.

Related:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_manager
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_wiki

stepharo

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

Hi

You have pier http://piercms.com
Esteban is thinking about doing a minipier.

Stef

Le 24/7/15 15:26, Bystroushaak a écrit :

> Hello.
>
> Is there any software projects/libraries for personal wiki (something
> like ZIM or CherryTree or Orgmode for writing texts/notes) and
> personal information managing in Pharo?
>
> I think that Pharo would be great for this kind of software, because
> it would provide rich scripting options. Also the idea of representing
> informations as objects is really great.
>
> For example; now I keep list of books I read in DSV file. With this
> SW, I could have a list of objects representing the books, which could
> be sorted or rendered to lower level protocols, like DSV/XML/whatever.
>
> Related:
> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_manager
> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_wiki
>
>
>

Peter Uhnak

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

But Pier is in the browser, no?

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 7:06 PM, stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi

You have pier http://piercms.com
Esteban is thinking about doing a minipier.

Stef

Le 24/7/15 15:26, Bystroushaak a écrit :

Hello.

Is there any software projects/libraries for personal wiki (something like ZIM or CherryTree or Orgmode for writing texts/notes) and personal information managing in Pharo?

I think that Pharo would be great for this kind of software, because it would provide rich scripting options. Also the idea of representing informations as objects is really great.

For example; now I keep list of books I read in DSV file. With this SW, I could have a list of objects representing the books, which could be sorted or rendered to lower level protocols, like DSV/XML/whatever.

Related:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_information_manager
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_wiki

Bystroushaak

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by stepharo

Hello.

Thanks for reply, but this is not what I mean. Wiki is all about
presentation of the informations to other users.

On the other hand, personal wiki/PIM is tool for introspection of your
own brain, microscope designed to look into yourself. It is meant to run
in one thread on your computer, to organize files and ideas. There may
be calendar to help you with your agenda, or maybe contact list and so on..

Another term for what I am looking for may be outliner:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner

Dne 24.7.2015 v 19:06 stepharo napsal(a):
> Hi
>
> You have pier http://piercms.com
> Esteban is thinking about doing a minipier.
>
> Stef

Offray

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

Hi

I'm making one of such outliners on Pharo. The code, interface and
functionality are pretty immature, the interface/documentation is almost
only in Spanish, and is progressing slowly, but any help or advice is
welcome. In the blog entries at [1] and [2] you could find some of the
explorations and previous personal wikis / outliner I had used and the
technologies I'm using to implement this idea on pharo and the problems
I faced (some of them already solved) and some ideas for the future. [3]
is the website for the project and [4] is the project repository

[1]
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/on-deepness-and-complexity-of-ipython-documents.html
[2]
http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/grafoscopio-idea-and-initial-progress.html

[3] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/
[4] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Grafoscopio

Let me know if this helps,

Offray

On 24/07/15 15:34, Bystroushaak wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Thanks for reply, but this is not what I mean. Wiki is all about
> presentation of the informations to other users.
>
> On the other hand, personal wiki/PIM is tool for introspection of your
> own brain, microscope designed to look into yourself. It is meant to
> run in one thread on your computer, to organize files and ideas. There
> may be calendar to help you with your agenda, or maybe contact list
> and so on..
>
> Another term for what I am looking for may be outliner:
>
> - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliner
>
> Dne 24.7.2015 v 19:06 stepharo napsal(a):
>> Hi
>>
>> You have pier http://piercms.com
>> Esteban is thinking about doing a minipier.
>>
>> Stef
>
>
>

Bystroushaak

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

Hi.

That really looks interesting!

Dne 25.7.2015 v 21:49 Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas napsal(a):

> Hi
>
> I'm making one of such outliners on Pharo. The code, interface and
> functionality are pretty immature, the interface/documentation is almost
> only in Spanish, and is progressing slowly, but any help or advice is
> welcome. In the blog entries at [1] and [2] you could find some of the
> explorations and previous personal wikis / outliner I had used and the
> technologies I'm using to implement this idea on pharo and the problems
> I faced (some of them already solved) and some ideas for the future. [3]
> is the website for the project and [4] is the project repository
>
> [1]
> http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/on-deepness-and-complexity-of-ipython-documents.html
>
> [2]
> http://mutabit.com/offray/static/blog/output/posts/grafoscopio-idea-and-initial-progress.html
>
> [3] http://mutabit.com/grafoscopio/
> [4] http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~Offray/Grafoscopio
>
> Let me know if this helps,
>
> Offray
>

Pierce Ng-3

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Bystroushaak

On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 03:26:59PM +0200, Bystroushaak wrote:
> Is there any software projects/libraries for personal wiki
> (something like ZIM or CherryTree or Orgmode for writing
> texts/notes) and personal information managing in Pharo?

I started with Tcl's wikit, using the Tk interface, moved on to Fossil with its
web interface. I now know enough of what I want to do something suited to my
needs in Pharo. E.g. I really want transclusion. Mentally sketching it out and
learning Pier at the same time.

Some Hacker News links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8270759
On designing a personal knowledge base

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9911942
Show HN: FAQT - A lightweight, personal knowledge base

Pierce
>

Evan Donahue

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Bystroushaak

Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.

Evan

Andy Jones

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again - specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

On 26 July 2015 21:27:15 BST, Evan Donahue <[hidden email]> wrote:

Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.

Evan

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Offray

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Evan Donahue

Count me in, but I don't understant pretty well the offline part of the
talk...do you mean face to face?

Cheers,

Offray

On 26/07/15 15:27, Evan Donahue wrote:
> Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been
> writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does
> anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I
> expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and
> technical.
>
> Evan
>
>

Bystroushaak

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Andy Jones

Yeah. It is one of the reasons I started to learn pharo. It simply looks
like best tool to build my own exocortex.

Dne 26.7.2015 v 22:30 Andy Jones napsal(a):
> LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again -
> specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I
> certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

Offray

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Offray

Ohh offline of the mailing list. I got it! Wouldn't be better if we talk
here about the ideas of outliners an PIM made with Pharo? Maybe this can
help with ideas and discussion at least until it gets traction.

Cheers,

Offray

On 26/07/15 16:55, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:

> Count me in, but I don't understant pretty well the offline part of
> the talk...do you mean face to face?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Offray
>
> On 26/07/15 15:27, Evan Donahue wrote:
>> Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been
>> writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does
>> anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I
>> expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual
>> and technical.
>>
>> Evan
>>
>>
>
>
>

NorbertHartl

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

> Am 27.07.2015 um 04:01 schrieb Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]>:
>
> Ohh offline of the mailing list. I got it! Wouldn't be better if we talk here about the ideas of outliners an PIM made with Pharo? Maybe this can help with ideas and discussion at least until it gets traction.
>
+1

Norbert

> Cheers,
>
> Offray
>
>> On 26/07/15 16:55, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas wrote:
>> Count me in, but I don't understant pretty well the offline part of the talk...do you mean face to face?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Offray
>>
>>> On 26/07/15 15:27, Evan Donahue wrote:
>>> Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.
>>>
>>> Evan
>
>

stepharo

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Andy Jones

Le 26/7/15 22:30, Andy Jones a écrit :

LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again - specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

If you want a wiki syntax use pillar because it is the syntax of Pier and you will get for free all the instratucture and outputter and
editing support.

On 26 July 2015 21:27:15 BST, Evan Donahue [hidden email] wrote:

Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.

Evan

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Peter Uhnak

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

I think that we would need some better support for text rendering for Pillar to be usable inside Pharo --- that's reason why I gave up on this long ago and am still using html (and js) for myself... and also because of clickable links.

Kasper Østerbye did this some time ago

(original thread http://forum.world.st/Class-comments-rendered-in-Nautilus-through-Pillar-td4819726.html )

However I have no idea what is the current state of it (Pillar repository shows only a single commit from April).

Ideally I want full html+css renderer, but that is hard.

Peter

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 9:35 AM, stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Le 26/7/15 22:30, Andy Jones a écrit :

LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again - specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

If you want a wiki syntax use pillar because it is the syntax of Pier and you will get for free all the instratucture and outputter and
editing support.

On 26 July 2015 21:27:15 BST, Evan Donahue [hidden email] wrote:

Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.

Evan

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Damien Cassou-2

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Offray

Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <[hidden email]> writes:

> Ohh offline of the mailing list. I got it! Wouldn't be better if we talk
> here about the ideas of outliners an PIM made with Pharo? Maybe this can
> help with ideas and discussion at least until it gets traction.

please continue on the mailing list

--
Damien Cassou
http://damiencassou.seasidehosting.st

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without
losing enthusiasm." --Winston Churchill

stepharo

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Peter Uhnak

Once we will get TxText we will really invest into nice rendering. Now nothing prevents someone to push to have comments better rendered
based on kasper

Stef

Le 27/7/15 10:09, Peter Uhnák a écrit :

I think that we would need some better support for text rendering for Pillar to be usable inside Pharo --- that's reason why I gave up on this long ago and am still using html (and js) for myself... and also because of clickable links.

Kasper Østerbye did this some time ago

(original thread http://forum.world.st/Class-comments-rendered-in-Nautilus-through-Pillar-td4819726.html )

However I have no idea what is the current state of it (Pillar repository shows only a single commit from April).

Ideally I want full html+css renderer, but that is hard.

Peter

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 9:35 AM, stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Le 26/7/15 22:30, Andy Jones a écrit :

LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again - specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

If you want a wiki syntax use pillar because it is the syntax of Pier and you will get for free all the instratucture and outputter and
editing support.

On 26 July 2015 21:27:15 BST, Evan Donahue [hidden email] wrote:

Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.

Evan

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

Tudor Girba-2

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

Indeed, TxText should provide live rendering.

In the meantime, we have Rubric and there is a reasonable support for live rendering and linking:

http://www.humane-assessment.com/blog/writing-pillar-books-with-the-gtinspector/

However, the current problem is the parser. In my solution, I used an island parser based on PetitParser. That's because the main parser is not flexible enough and, for example, does not preserve the locations of AST nodes. So, I would suggest to build on top of the GTInspector extension for now and focus on the Pillar parser. Once the parser will be usable for live rendering, we can switch to the TxText.

Who would be interested in participating?

Cheers,

Doru

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 12:21 PM, stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Once we will get TxText we will really invest into nice rendering. Now nothing prevents someone to push to have comments better rendered
based on kasper

Stef

Le 27/7/15 10:09, Peter Uhnák a écrit :

I think that we would need some better support for text rendering for Pillar to be usable inside Pharo --- that's reason why I gave up on this long ago and am still using html (and js) for myself... and also because of clickable links.

Kasper Østerbye did this some time ago

(original thread http://forum.world.st/Class-comments-rendered-in-Nautilus-through-Pillar-td4819726.html )

However I have no idea what is the current state of it (Pillar repository shows only a single commit from April).

Ideally I want full html+css renderer, but that is hard.

Peter

On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 9:35 AM, stepharo <[hidden email]> wrote:

Le 26/7/15 22:30, Andy Jones a écrit :

LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again - specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

If you want a wiki syntax use pillar because it is the syntax of Pier and you will get for free all the instratucture and outputter and
editing support.

On 26 July 2015 21:27:15 BST, Evan Donahue [hidden email] wrote:

Seems that Pharo is a magnet for this kind of project. I've been writing one as well and using it to organize my research notes. Does anyone working on personal info mgmt tools want to talk offline? I expect we're running into some of the same issues, both conceptual and technical.

Evan

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

www.tudorgirba.com

"Every thing has its own flow"

Offray

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by stepharo

Hi,

On 27/07/15 02:35, stepharo wrote:

Le 26/7/15 22:30, Andy Jones a écrit :

LOL - this is actually what brought me back to Smalltalk again - specifically the idea of some sort of programmable Wiki - but I certainly don't have any code yet; complete newb here.

If you want a wiki syntax use pillar because it is the syntax of Pier and you will get for free all the instratucture and outputter and
editing support.

I'm using pandoc's markdown and trying to make pandoc to talk better with Pharo. Pandoc has support for a lot of languages (see graph at [1]), including html and LaTeX, but also a more plural community [2] including plublishers [3] (the post is about using IPython notebook but the supporting format is markdown). In my opinion this is a good example of a place where we need to talk better with external libraries, frameworks and communities.

[1] http://pandoc.org/
[2] http://scholarlymarkdown.com/
[3] https://beta.oreilly.com/ideas/jupyter-at-oreilly

Cheers,

Offray

Evan Donahue

Re: Personal wiki / information manager

In reply to this post by Bystroushaak

Ah, yes, by 'offline' I did mean outside of the mailing list, but that was purely out of consideration for the list. If the list wants to hear it, far be it from me to keep it from them.

For my part, I am a graduate student working on my dissertation, and I have been trying to build tools to facilitate that as I go, from taking and sharing notes, to visualizing primary material, to (eventually) organizing and writing the dissertation. I have been following Offray's updates with interest, as I think my goals are very much allied, but I am starting in a slightly different place, if I have understood correctly (research and organizing, and not yet writing, sharing, or publishing). My efforts thus far have been concentrated in two repositories:

Chancery (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Chancery) is an early prototype for a note taking system. I am coming from taking notes in emacs org-mode, and so Chancery right now is the most straightforward collapsable tree outliner/note taker that could give me functionality basically equivalent to what I had in org-mode, and serve as a platform to co-evolve my research methods and their supporting technology. The near-term goals for this involve adding metadata (authors, dates, etc) to the sources I am annotating and using that for various kinds of historical visualization (and further, attendant annotation) eg who wrote what when, referencing who, influenced by what, etc), and can I edit all that directly in its graphical form. The status of this project is that it is usable by myself and those I have worked with on it (and I use it as my primary note taking system), but I'm not sure what it would look like to someone loading it at the moment (no real intro/docs, as it was just a quick prototype to provoke further design discussion).

Trantor (http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~EvanDonahue/Trantor) is a disttributed p2p system for incrementally keeping data structures in sync between multiple, asynchronously connected pharo instances across the internet without requiring human attention to resolve merge conflicts (think laptos where data is edited offline and then automatically synced when they connect to one another); it is my answer to sharing and collaboration for things created in Chancery (although it is a more general purpose project). Functionally, Trantor provides a set of common datatypes (set, dict, text blob, etc) and a means to run nodes and peer them for synchronization of said datatypes. The goal with respect to Chancery/personal information management is being able to easily grab some structured set of notes or writing out of the note taking system and share it with collaborators or colleagues with a button click, and without having to go through the whole export/send/manage versions dance. This project is about 85% complete, the proof of concept works, it just needs a big refactor to make it usable and quash some bugs.

I guess my observations on using Pharo thus far are first, that it is absolutely ideal for evolving prototypes, since you get a sort of poor man's gui and persistance (object inspector + image serialization) basically for free, which is 90% of the work of such a simple information management app prototype. I have a fully functional tree outliner at a point when in another language I would still be trying to hack a low functionality command line interface. The other thing I've found refreshing is that my application can live as one among many within the image, sharing data with other programs by passing objects around in a way that is impossible to do with a standalone application running on a modern operating system. the dream of the web is, I think, heading more in this direction, but working with the browser (as I was before I came to pharo) requires coordinating a separate server process, compressing everything into http/html/json, and a host of other problems that vanish when you can just serialize objects between pharo instances. In short, I'm getting a lot done in this language and I expect I'll be around for a while.

Cheers,

Evan