I owe another thanks to Bill Flanagan for installing the WordPress markdown pluggin, which enables me to format my posts in markdown rather than in HTML. This really makes writing blog entries much more fun and convenient since now I can easily use TextMate to write my entries offline at my leisure, and post them when I am online.
Strictly speaking, markdown support and TextMate offline editing are separate issues, but their combination really makes things pleasant. I am not a big fan of the WordPress online editor - it is really just too slow, and I also have to be online to write or edit posts. While this is not usually a problem, there are certain times like when I am on a plane that I would like the ability to write and edit posts. The WordPress editor also makes you use HTML, which I find to be a bit unwieldy. Ok, one at a time.
First markdown. Markdown is a simple markup language that lets you write things like [this link to the original markdown site](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) (this link to the original markdown site), instead of HTML <a> tags. In this way, markdown is very similar to mediawiki syntax.
Second is TextMate’s ability to interact with the WordPress API. I really can’t put it any better than this TextMate blogging screencast, but the gist of it goes something like this: Every WordPress blog has a special url that can receive what are called XMLRPC requests. XMLRPC stands for ‘XML Remote Procedure Call’, and it essentially means that you can write a client to send specific pieces of XML to the WordPress blog to ask it to return information such as a list of posts. You can also send whole blog posts formatted appropriately, and the WordPress blog, via this API, will post them for you.
You can then write any client you want to take advantage of this system, and this is what the TextMate people have done. Since you only need to interact with the WordPress blog to get a list of posts, or while posting content, you can do the majority of your writing and editing offline! And what is more, you can write any client to do this - it doesn’t have to be TextMate.
And this brings me to my ideas about where OWW should go technologically to help foster Open Lab Notebooks. One of my biggest complaints that I have about the OWW wiki is that I have to be online to to write a wiki entry. Not only that, but you have to deal with the whims of your connection to OWW - it is really frustrating to lose a post because your connection to OWW timed out, or you accidentally closed that browser window before you hit save. I can imagine a system where the OWW wiki has an API that allows me to write a TextMate pluggin to interact with it much like TextMate can now interact with WordPress. I can then take notes in the lab during the day, and not worry about my internet connection. I can edit a paper on the plane, and post my update to OWW when I have an internet connection again. What is more, I can easily write TextMate templates to auto-fill in information that is particular to my experiment, or article.
And that is just the start of it. By exposing an OWW API, I can then write code that automatically posts the results of my latest calculations on my OWW wiki pages. Or I can get my favorite lab instrument X to automatically upload a data file containing the data from the latest run. The possibilities are endless.
I should say that things like this can be done right now, but mostly through some hacks that don’t expose the full power of the OWW mediawiki software. I think with a little tweaks, we’ll have everything we need to let client developers have a hey-day.
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Posted: November 4th, 2007 under Uncategorized.
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