Steve Maddison wrote:
So, assuming the way forward is to build a new system
to host this
information, what kind of features would people like to see? A few
things I've been mulling over:
At the risk of provoking a bout of "creeping featurism", it would be
nice if this system could track books, journals and so forth, and not
just reference manuals.
That is, it would be nice to have the option of:
- Tree-based navigation. So I could navigate through, say:
BYTE => 1979 => January => [TOC]
- Tables of contents (where available) for books, journals, etc.
Very handy when you're looking for a specific article and don't
know where it is.
- Open-source, with as few dependencies as possible. PHP+PDO would
be my choice (maybe PHP+CodeIgniter). Should be possible to install
a version on a "home" server or desktop machine (Linux/OSX box?) to
play with.
- XML-based API. Make the data available to other systems. Maybe limit
this to registered users to prevent (or at least reduce the
likelihood of) data-scraping and the associated bandwidth/CPU costs.
* Replication of the entire system to mirrors, or at
least the ability
to pack the whole shebang up and move it to a different host with
relative ease.
Mysqldump and a 15-minute (or whatever) period each day when the DBs
sync against each other?
Where do we go from here? I'd be happy to
contribute in terms of
design, coding and hosting of a version control repository, maybe even
the finished system itself.
I'd be happy to contribute hosting, development time and such. PHP, PDO,
Smarty, MySQL and occasionally CodeIgniter are my "weapons of choice"
for webapps, and I'm a total grammar and standards-compliance Nazi -- if
I see a typo or a glitch that breaks HTML/CSS validation, I WILL fix it.
I don't do AJAX, but I'm willing to learn (there are two O'Reilly AJAX
books on my desk waiting to be read).
As long as it doesn't kill my server (it's a quad Xeon with 500GB RAID1
HDD and 8GB RAM, so "not likely"), I'm fine with it.
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/