WikiDiff Notifications

[4Jun2003]PS

I intend to extend my WikiDiff service with some form of email subscriptions. I want to do this because I hardly ever use my own service, because there is just too much to read.

Ideas

• Daily email service, right after generation of the wikidiff page
• Web based subscription form where you can register the page numbers you are interested in
• When you register for a category page number, you'll be notified about any page that references that category
• You can also register for new pages, of course.
• Two output formats: HTML WikiDiff style, plaintext email with links to wikidiff+#anchor and to the wiki itself.

So. Those are my ideas, before I start writing, I'd like to hear what other potential users would like to see.

I'll code the webbased part in AOLServer on my own machine, because it'd take me too much effort to do it any other way. The email generation/page selection code will be pure Tcl accessing a (Postgresql) database. Once I am done, I would be quite happy to transfer the stuff to the mini.net server if that means additional (maybe realtime) feature can be added - I just don't see a pressing need for them right now.

PT 4-Jun-03: Actually what I'd much rather see is a diff link on each page as is done for TWiki [L1 ] However, I don't know that the design of this wiki would permit this. I find I always go first to the Recent Changes page and the examine modified pages in which I'm interested. If the change is a small change and not at the end of the file, the viewing a diff would make it much more simple to find.

CM 5-Jun-03: Pat, yes the design of wikit allows such feature. See the paragraph about "Last Diffs patch" from Brian Theado in the Ideas for Wikit enhancements page. Brian is the author of tkoutline and has patched wikit to turn the Updated on <date> string in the footer into a colored context diff with the previous version. I found both the UI idea and the feature to be extremely nice and useful ! It is IMHO not redundant with a more complex CVS mechanism such as the current one that can store all history mostly for safety reasons. This one is more user-oriented but I happen to use it a lot, doing exactly like you on our internal wiki: first look at the last changes, then click on the diffs.

PS 5-Jun-03: Pat, I agree and already have such a patched version of the wikit running at a local site here. It works rather nicely, you can click on the revision history and retrieve diffs between arbitrary versions. The problem is the diff. It still uses the external diff, not the new and optimized diff-in-tcl. Anyone interested can mail me for a copy. The overall patching I needed to do was fairly minimal and importing the entire version history from tclhist should not be a difficult problem. My proposed feature on this page is for those of us who like email notifications. Like for example this page, discussions are hard to follow and a bunch of pages I am interested stay below my radar.

AK: Note that the core algorithm for diff-in-tcl (as written by Kevin Kenny) has been added to tcllib, as part of the extended list manipulation commands in struct.