[pmwiki-users] Re: pmwiki-users Digest, Vol 2, Issue 41

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Aug 5 23:45:28 CDT 2005


On Fri, Aug 05, 2005 at 08:33:27PM -0700, John W Morris wrote:
>    ...
>    Now that I've irritated the pmwiki world, I will again observe silence.

FWIW, I don't think you've irritated the pmwiki world (certainly not
mine) -- I think it's just the general phenomenon that people with 
different points of view are more likely to respond to a message 
than those who agree with it.

At any rate, all of the messages are proving to be extremely helpful
for me to formulate where I want things to head.  

On the question of linking to messages in the mailing list archives,
I'm thinking that the correct answer is "don't do it".  I like and
use gmane a lot, but I'm also often frustrated by its interface and
the fact that searches often seem to fail or simply hang.  As far as
using the archives on pmichaud.com, they lack a search feature and 
at present it's too much work to locate the message identifier and
accurately paste it into a page.

Beyond that, for the pmwiki-docs if an archived message or thread
is important enough to be referenced from the docs then it probably
should just be *in* the docs.

So, what we really need is a good way to get message contents from
the archive or mailing list into a wiki page.  This has been
discussed off-and-on for quite a while but shelved for a variety of
reasons.  In the past we've talked about having an email-to-wiki
gateway, which would make it easy for someone to get things from
email messages into wiki pages on pmwiki.org.  I'll still probably
do this at some point, but unfortunately we often don't recognize
that a particular message or thread is important until some time 
later, when the message is gone from our mailboxes.

So, here's another thought -- we could use bookmarklets to
make it easy to get content from the mailing list archives into
pmwiki.org pages.  A "bookmarklet" is a specialized bookmark 
stored in a browser (just like any other bookmark) that can
be used to send the address of a currently viewed page to
another location.

For this application, we can create a bookmarklet for the
pmichaud.com and gmane.org archives; when an author is viewing
one of these archive pages and wants to add the message contents
to a page on pmwiki.org, they simply activate the bookmarklet.
A corresponding script on pmwiki.org then prompts the user for
the name of the page to create or append, grabs the appropriate
message from pmichaud.com's local archive, formats it for use in
a wiki page, and presents an edit form where it can be further
adjusted and ultimately saved to a page.

Thus, authors can use whatever archive is most useful to them,
and we have an easy way to get content from the archives 
into pages on pmwiki.org.

Another approach would be to have a custom edit form or
action on pmwiki.org that allows an author to specify an 
archive url or message-id to be inserted into the 
currently edited page.

At any rate, I'm thinking the ultimate answer is that we should
be copying the contents of important archive messages into the
wiki and not simply referencing the messages, since we can't
guarantee the stability or availability of the archives to
people reading the documentation.  This also improves the
search results.

Pm




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