On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:43:17 AM UTC-5, Thomas Passin wrote: > > Here's something interesting. Remember the Memex, described by Vannebar > Bush in 1945? It sounded like a mixture of the Web and a zettelkasten, > with better media input means than perhaps we have today. Well, someone is > trying to actually build one, or at least something as close as he can get > given that the article was only a notional sketch of an idea, and that > technology has changed a lot since then. Take a look - > > http://memexsim.sourceforge.net/index.html >
Remember my mentioning my bookmarks application in an earlier post? Well, it has some zettel-box-like features. I found the link to the Memex simulator while I was checking to see which Zettelkasten bookmarks I had captured so far. Apparently I had found the link years ago and completely forgotten about it. But there it was, waiting to be discovered again. Here is a screen shot showing the display where I found it. I had just searched for "zettel": http://tompassin.net/pub/zettel/zetel_display.png By clicking one of the "details" links, I saw that there were more bookmarks under a subheading - http://tompassin.net/pub/zettel/zettel_finding_more_related.png By clicking on "Related Terms", I can see that there are two: http://tompassin.net/pub/zettel/zettel_related_headings.png To give a better idea of how the "related" functionality works, here are the related terms for "Conceptual Graphs": http://tompassin.net/pub/zettel/zettel_conceptual_graphs_related.png I can add a note - or other types of annotation - to a bookmark: http://tompassin.net/pub/zettel/zettel_add_note.png You can see that I actually have much of the functionality that we are talking about, if we used note files as a target rather than web pages. The main problem with my prototype is you can't save data directly to the file system. Browsers don't let you do that. Whenever I have collected some new bookmarks in my browser, I save the bookmarks and run some scripts against the bookmarks file. That recreates everything including the crosslinks, except for my added annotations. Those I have to write as text to a browser page (I have a link that runs the javascript to do this), do a View Source, copy the text, and paste it into my separate annotation file. Anyone would ask why I didn't have the web server do all this. The reason is that I wanted to make it run entirely on a local machine without a server at all. It all runs on files on the file system with no computation except what's in the web pages. That was around 2004. It turns out that nowadays, that won't work because most if not all web servers prohibit my style of on-computer file linking for security purposes. So I finally gave in and put the system on a Tomcat web server on my own computer. No changes were needed to make this work. All pages are static files. Obviously if the app were redesigned today, you could use a Python back end instead of using javascript in the web pages. The way I wrote the core engine, it's easy to port to Python (I did it for an earlier version). You could serialize the data with JSON - we didn't have that back then, so my serialization takes the form of a code generator that writes the javascript needed to reconstruct the whole thing. Or you could put the back end code into a plugin for Leo. My system even treats files in selected directories on my computer as bookmarks - they could actually be notes if you wanted. The file name becomes the bookmark title. You can see I've been thinking about this area for a long time. That's why I got interested when @andyjim started asking questions about zettelkasten. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/305532fa-d3fd-44a7-a16b-9fd630036780%40googlegroups.com.
