KNotations

Please note that we have had to put the date back to Friday June 9.

We have been extremely busy improving, testing and just plain using KNotes... though we have not been doing a very good job of blogging about it :o)

We've been hammering out many new features in several areas: collaboration / social software / community building / profiling and portfolios. Many of those features are not yet being used in our production version, but over the next months expect to see an increasing number of special-purpose blogging scenarios and features in our portals.

Our public, mature version of KNotes is about to take a small leap forward as well. We are almost finished preparing and testing a new public beta - 0.85. The tarball will be available here by Monday. SourceForge's site has been having a lot of problems lately, so we're not sure when the CVS version will be updated; please use the tarballs released here for the time being.

I'll try to document some of the new features in this weblog. If you have any questions please feel free to email me -- mike AT theknownet DOT com

Sometime in the next week, I'll also - finally! - be announcing KNotes within Plone.org. Many apologies to the hard-working Plonistas who've had to nag me to get round to this; our procrastination has been in part down to wanting to make the documentation more complete and the skin-ability more thoroughgoing :o}

I plan to work hard over the next 10 days on roadmap documentation. We'll also be starting either mailing lists or special blog_forums for users, administrators and developers, and sometime this summer knotes.net will at last get the facelift it needs.

KNotes can be a very powerful and user-pleasing addition to a Plone portal. Knotes + Plone makes a great platform for experimenting with educational or other applications which combine weblogging with social software and/or other functionalities. If you would like to try making use of KNotes, please let us know how you get on. If you feel you can help with development, documentation, or best-practice illustration, we'd really love to hear from you!

Apologies for this hasty post - we really have been hammering at the paid-for-projects recently, so haven't got much time for documenting our progress. The good news on this front is that we are about to draw lines under the administrative work for two very labour-intensive european projects; when that's complete we'll have much more time to spend on documenting progress, building connections with other developers and community-site managers, and collaborating on experiments using knotes as part of educational and community-building experiments. The text below is taken from the brief announcement I just made on our knownet site:

Knotes is now available in a new milestone: version 0.85.

See our Knotes download page for download files and other links. There are quite a few new or improved features in this release.

We will be writing up the new features - and producing an outline of our roadmap for Knotes - as soon as we get a chance (sorry, we've been working very hard on paid-for project deadlines, which makes knotes-documentation-time hard to come by).

We are big fans of del.icio.us here at KnowNet, and maintain our own bookmarking pretty avidly (see for instance my linklog). We're also proselytisers for the 'data outside' approach to managing the different aspects of a project's content-management needs, and we've worked hard to train our project colleagues in the use of social bookmarking systems. This inevitably leads to people having multiple del.icio.us accounts that they have an interest in, which can become awkward.

Of course, that's what the del.icio.us API is there for :o) Yesterday we wrote a script (python) which we've started using to copy items with certain tags between mutually trusting accounts. We've run it to create the beginning content for three project accounts so far (pulling this content in from four main accounts in various combinations), and have set up chron jobs to maintain the synching workflow nightly.

The first screenshot shows the simple form used to do a batch copy between accounts (the chron jobs just use the same parameters as arguments in a url). The second screenshot shows a tag cloud displaying tags for a project account which includes many items pulled in using the API script. See EGCRF's del.icio.us bookmarks. We'll be publicising the nookmarks tag clouds for other project sites soon.

Please let us know if you're interested in the script. For historical reasons, it requires Plone and a little product of ours called KNUtilities.