Jeff Mesnil

Cool: Adam Bosworth is blogging again.
I thought it was a shame he stopped talking when he was hired by Google because a few people could not make the difference between his own opinion and the company he was working for.

Now that he has left Google and created a new startup, I’m looking forward to reading what he is up to….

Google just released Gears which is :

“an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness”.

At first glance, it seems to be the implementation of what Adam Bosworth envisioned when he was talking about BEA’s Alchemy and browser connectivity (search for “When connectivity isn’t certain” at the middle of the page).

Gears is already enabled for Google Reader. I wonder how long it will take to have it supported in Gmail…

Another potential use case for Gears is to develop browser-based desktop applications. Their main data store will be provided by Gears database which could be synchronized from time to time to a web store. Office applications (document, spreadsheets, calendar) seem like good candidate for that approach: they’ll feel faster and more responsive that way. Synchronizing them will only be done when (auto) saving the document/spreadsheet/event.

Spotted on Ruby On Rails mailing list: http://panic.com/goods/.

I especially like the ability to drag and drop items and the ‘puff’ effect when you remove an item from the shopping cart (it’s the same effect than on Mac OS X Dock).

By its very own nature, a Wiki is a bazaar and it works great like that. But from time to time, you neet to get some order from that chaos.
Let take the example of a big corporate wiki with thousand pages and hundred users. Most of the pages are related to a few other pages only and each users modify and read only a few pages. More than often, the wiki ends up with a lot of related information disseminated on hundred pages with no apparent navigation between them. Given that users deal only with a small subset of this huge wiki, they may not be aware that potential useful information is sitting at other places.

To build some order in this chaos, a very useful feature implemented by most wiki is backlinks. To put it simply, a backlink on a page gives you a list of all the wiki pages pointing to that page thus enabling a backward navigation.
For example in the c2 wiki, every page has a backlink which is the title of the page. If you click on that title, you get a list of all wiki pages which points to that page. Other wikis present that differently (in Twiki, it’s a Ref-By link) but most wikis I encountered got that feature.
You then can use some naming rules. For example you can have (possibly empty) wiki pages whose names ends with Category (e.g. DevelopmentCategory, XmlCategory) and every pages related to that kind of category can add a link to one of these category pages. E.g. on a page documenting XML binding, I would put a “in XmlCategory” at the beginning of the page to create a link to the XmlCategory page. An user interested to find information about XML has just to use the backlink of the XmlCategory page to find a link to my XML binding page.

<

p> Basically with this very simple naming rule, you can categorize your wiki pages so that you can then browse the whole wiki through its backlinks.
To make it even better, I can create a CategoryCategory page which has a backlink to every other category pages. You have then an entry point to browse all the wiki based on these categories.

What is great with that approach is that users who write the pages and are the best to categorize it can help other users to find the information very easily.

As an aside, when I wrote this entry, I realized that there is a recurring pattern in the way I want to organize my data. I don’t organize my data anymore (a.k.a all in one place and no deep tree structure) but rely more and more on classification with tags, labels, categories to find it. This behavior is occuring with my mails, bookmarks, wiki pages, pictures,… But more about that in another post.

It’s so simple, it’s not really a bookmarklet…

I added a bookmark in Firefox which points to http://del.icio.us/jmesnil/%s and added a keyword d for it.
So now when I want to go to my del.icio.us java bookmarks, I just have to type d java in the address bar to go to it.
If I want to go to my java and jms bookmarks, it’s d java+jms.

<disclaimer>
I’m a total keyboard junkie. Too much emacs has definitely hurt my brain.
</disclaimer>