2005-09-02
Minimal Functions Wait to Interact ...... in the realm of blogging / wiki-ing / I-dunno-what-ing. Blosxom is a simple, powerful, flat-file-based weblogging engine: Snarf your files, which are categorized hierarchically by (guess what?) the file system, and (minimally) concatenate the appropriate ones and apply the requested style. (Need To Know did say 'It's blogging if blogging was a shell command'.) Were that not enough, it's user-extensible in a gajillion different directions through its plugins. (Most notably, it can do logins, web-based editing, multiple categorization (xref), sideblogs, etc. etc.) Some folks run it atop a cvs repository. Now then. Another thing that runs atop cvs is TinyWiki, which is also simple and powerful. Both are also small. I reckon a Blosxom flavor could be cooked up that allows (properly-authenticated) users to access the TinyWiki scripts and use them for editing, cross-linking, et cetera. If either or both could be persuaded that the one true and holy markup is Markdown, that would be nice too. And as to the end presentation: There is a bunch of potential for interfacing via a TiddlyWiki-style presentation. The idea was brought up by BloTid, but sadly, BloTid appears to be stalled cold. At any rate, one advantage I can see to presenting stories that way is that they could be rendered as notecard-like entities that present in a pile, as sticky notes with a screen location (buggy), or some other way. There are numerous server-sides that adapt and extend the original (single-doc, self-contained) TiddlyWiki.Now, as to how all of this ought to fit together ... good question. Blosxom sits at the core, I think, slicing and dicing the files in order to determine which ones go into what output as determined by parsing the URL. TinyWiki handles editing and cross-linking tasks, and perhaps its Active Wiki Pages (perl scripting from within the wiki!) pull in additional files (say, those that are linked to). A TiddlyWiki flavor is the default; it includes the usual posts as visible tiddlers and any footnotes, linked files, etc., as hidden tiddlers. Or something. There's a *lot* of orthogonal as well as overlapping technology among these three, and it's probably going to take several drafts before we see a useful proposal for integrating them.
05:28
