RE: Hosting of the cookbook

MJRay wrote:

> On 2004-04-20 07:26:13 +0100 Anton van Straaten
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I've started a page listing some of the infrastructure items
>> we've discussed so far, at:
>> http://shizuku.appsolutions.com/twiki/bin/view/Cookbook/AdminOverview
>
> Now I don't know which Cookbook wiki I am supposed to be using: is
> this the one at webhop too?

The webhop address is just an alias for the same site.  Currently, you
can't use the webhop address to generate URLs to link to a specific page
from the outside.  We'll be fixing that before making the cookbook public,
of course.  Speaking of which, does anyone have any good ideas for a
Schematics domain name?

>> There's not a "How to Use Twiki" for authors yet, but the entire
>> TWiki docs are there for the browsing.
>
> This is quite a problem. I have been using wikis since the c2.com one,
> but I do not know TWiki and it does not seem very wiki-like, with new
> obfuscating jargon (topics?) and markup. Aren't wikis meant to be
> simple? Needing to learn Twiki seems another barrier to entry.

There's very little to learn.  Afaik, at least some of the other recipe
contributors were unfamiliar with TWiki before a couple of weeks ago.  I
think the main thing that's needed is a simple "getting started" writeup
oriented to new contributors, and I'm willing to work on that.  BTW, if
you haven't seen it already, you should check out the TWiki.WelcomeGuest
page, which is also linked from the WebHome page.

I think the point with TWiki is that some of the utter simplicity of
ordinary wikis is traded off for greater ability to manage the content.  I
think you might find that TWiki actually addresses some of the concerns
you've raised.  The biggest reason I haven't been worrying about using an
annotation system, or people trashing the site, is that the revision
history of any page is just a mouse click away (the "Diffs" link at the
bottom of the page).  The diffs basically give you an annotation-style
view of the edits that have been made.

>> Re annotations, I've added a topic called AdminAnnotationProposal
>> which describes a way we could integrate annotations with the
>> current cookbook design, if we want to.
>
> It sounds very complicated and lots of perl hacking. If you are
> confident of being able to do it, I'll take your word for it.

It should be easy enough.  What are our alternatives?  For comparison, the
patch to the perl code to hook in the Scheme formatter took all of about
three lines of Perl.  This one might take a little more, and we might even
do it in Scheme if that makes sense.

> When I click Edit, a password dialogue tells me to Cancel to register,
> but then it 404s. I used TWikiGuest instead for now, but what did I do
> wrong?

I'll check that out.  In the meantime, if you go to the
TWiki.TWikiRegistration page, you can register there.  It's also linked to
from the first link on the AuthorGuide page.

FYI, I checked that you can use MJRay as a name, and putting double
brackets around references to it will cause it to be recognized as a link.
 Also, "MJR" will autolink.

>> A big part of the reason that the author guide documentation is
>> incomplete is that there are still some unresolved issues. [...]
>
> Even creating and editing recipes? OK, fine. If no-one is doing those
> basic acts yet, the situation is not as daft as I thought.

Creating and editing recipes is very simple, and people have been doing
it.     Take a look at a few existing recipes for a model.  The unresolved
issues mainly relate to how to structure the coobook for both online
viewing and other publishing formats.

>> My latest idea on this subject is in the topic
>> AdminCookbookViews.
>
> I can see the page, but how do I find other things in this category
> (if that's the same as what Twiki calls a topic)?

A topic is just a page with a wikiname.  There's a link at the top of the
page that reads "Ref'd By".  Click that to see which other topics
reference the current page.  At the top right, there are also links to the
current topic's parent pages, although those are only meaningful if the
page was created from a page that makes sense as a parent, or if someone
bothered to set the parent (via the "More" link).

>> Using a proof of concept to communicate and possibly help move things
>> forward shouldn't be construed as "presenting a done deal". [...]
>
> As I wrote above, that wasn't the impression I'd got. This seemed like
> a full-blown charge off into the unknown rather than a scouting party.
> If the cookbook itself hasn't developed yet, or that development is
> being fed back into the schematics sources, then I'm sorry for getting
> jumpy and accusing you of railroading.

Not sure what you mean by "being fed back into the schematics sources". 
Which sources?  Everything we've done so far is on the Twiki site, and is
revision controlled by Twiki.  If we want to keep a copy of the wiki page
source in the Schematics cvs, we could probably do that with cvsup.

As to whether we're a scouting party or a full-blown charge into the
unknown, perhaps it's a bit of both.  If we need to, we'll do a full-blown
retreat with equal enthusiasm, I'm sure.  If it makes you happy to imagine
us as a bunch of Keystone Kops, that's your prerogative, but I'm used to
getting things done and making them work, and I'm having a hard time being
frightened by this particular unknown.  What's our worst-case scenario?

Anton




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