Frequently Asked Questions

If you have a question, please add it here and i'll do my best to answer it. (scroll down to #Simpleterms for the hard question, from last Friday)

Question: Wot, no InterWiki?

InterWiki linking on PikiePikie requires prefixing a "wiki:" before the name of the wiki. This is peculiar to many wikiers, and we're asking StevePike to change it over on Pikie:WebLog

Question: Where is RecentChanges? Most Wikis have this available on every page.

Answer: I've updated the footer to include RecentChanges (see Pikie:OverridingTemplates for how), and i plan to add a search box RealSoonNow?.

Question: Would be good to have the front page linked on every page as well.

As with many wikis, clicking on the logo takes you to the front page (which for now is AbbeNormal, it will probably change over the years. Conceptually, wikis don't really have front pages.

Simple terms

Question: In simple terms, what is the functionality you are looking for?

Answer: I'm not sure "simple terms" will work :-).

What i wrote Friday has expanded onto it's own page, RssReaderWanted -- lots of specific functionality about what i'm looking for from an RSS reader, eventually shading into another approach to the "elephant" i'm really after (see http://www.ourpla.net/john/wikiweblogpim.html#wikiweblogpim).

In the full context of that page, and AbbeNormal, i'm just trying to learn about and advocate better software. Currently the most frustrating thing to me is seeing the mind-boggling power of today's hardware, and the small degree to which software taps that power to help people locate, explore, create, organize and share, and build and even commune together.

Positively, i'm after that elephant. I can start being concrete, i just know i'll be incomplete:

• a user's stuff (files, messages, bookmarks, feeds, etc.) should be stored in a safe filesystem/database (e.g. journalling/ACID)
• backup should be trivial (this is like cars and seatbelts)
• more integration! (early PalmOs? development put focus on this).
• search should be available practically everywhere (2002, no search in MacOsx open/save dialog boxes!?).
• users should be offered more powerful tools for organizing their stuff, and gently encouraged to take responsibility for doing so
• ...

To be vague but brief, i want an external brain that helps me out however it can. To explore. The net is not one new medium. The net (and computers themselves) are a seemingly-inexhaustible source of new media, new ways of connecting.

To get "far out", i think that software is part of TheNextSingularity (or at least the foundation of human interconnection for many decades), and we just can't know what it will look like after the fact. We can just keep approaching it in thought and deed and see how it unfolds. There is an undefinable edge to what's real and good in reality, including software.

• I want to be in TheNextSingularity.
• I want to contribute to it being a good one.

My inclination is that plaintext or at least human-readable formats (especially for URLs?!), open standards, and free software are good ideas. There are too many other factors to be ironclad about it though.

WebLogs are exciting in part because they are putting large numbers of people at the helm of a new category of software, and some of these new tools have powerful databases at their core. As or more powerful than most filesystems in common use. So there's hope for implementing all kinds of features unlikely to happen on operating systems using inferior filesystems.

When i think of people realizing that they have such power, and making good use of it, it gives me more hope for a more grassroots, less coercive vision of the future.

WikiWiki represents an alternative to the time- and hierarchy-based ways of thinking that predominate, and a dedication to simplicity and clarity.

No, my feet are not on the ground. I'm trying.