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Some easy plugins to be had


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Jefficus

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Registered: 05/26/04
Posts: 59
Over the last two years, I've been making customizations to my Geeklog installation. They work for me, but I haven't exactly been following the Gospel on extending Geeklog properly. (Feeling much shame.) I have been hacking things in wherever seemed convenient.

Now that I'm contemplating upgrading to 1.4 (when it goes stable) I'm giving some thought to how to deal with my extensions. The best solution would be for me to just wrap 'em up in proper plugins and share them with the world, as well as with my 1.4 self. But I am in the deep throes of completing a PhD and have almost no time. So I thought, hmm, maybe one of the other GL-geeks would be interested in pluginifying my stuff for the benefit of all. On the off chance that this is true, I'll tell you all what I have, and see if anybody is interested in collaborating.

LaTeX: On my site, I can put tags around any text in an article, an ewiki or a forum posting , surrounded by !@ ... @! and it will be rendered at display time into fully formatted LaTeX output. This is especially useful for creating math expressions and quick pstricks diagrams without having to go 'offsite' to some kind of graphics or math editor.

Lilypond: I can put !# ... #! tags around any text in an article, ewiki or forum posting and it will be rendered as Lilypond sheet music, dropped into the article along with automatically generated links to a MIDI file and an MP3 file that play the defined music fragment.

These two extensions are completely encapsulated in two functions that take text input and return it with the appropriate changes after it's generated all the necessary graphics and stuffed them into a cache directory. (It only generates if the content hasn't already been rendered. If it has, it reuses the old cache info.)

BibTex: I can put !C tagstring C! tags around any text and it will be rendered as an [AuthorYear] citation which hyperlinks to a full description of the bibliography reference that has the 'tagstring' label in my BibTex db . Each entry in the bibliography has a keyword list. I can click on any of those keywords to jump to a bib listing with only those keywords. If the entry includes a reference to a local PDF or PS or a web URL, those links are displayed along with the entry.

I can put !B keyword B! anywhere in my system and it will be replaced by a bibliography of all my documents that have the 'keyword' defined in their keyword list.

I can put !D info D! anywhere in the system, where info is a bibtex entry, and that entry will be added to the bibliography and become linkable (via !C tags) from anywhere in the system.

For each entry in the system, a new page is created in my ewiki that gets autopopulated with the bibtex record. These are the pages that are linked by the !C tags elsewhere. On this page, I make notes about the various documents in my bibliography.

I use this bibtex system to manage the records in my research bibliography. I can create custom subsets for use in any papers I'm writing and the resulting ewiki network is a pretty thorough wiki-net on the topics I'm researching.

I also use a couple of recurring keywords in my entries: ToRead and Jefficus. By using !B ToRead B!, I have a page that contains all the documents I've discovered and plan to read, but haven't read yet: my personal research reading list. And the !B Jefficus B! gives me an instant display of my own papers, which I've hooked into my nav system to show off my list of publications. (Although, at the moment, I haven't made this available to visitors on my site. I'm still working on a way to keep my research notes private but let people read the bibliography.)

That's about it. The first two tools (Latex and Lilypond) are pretty mature and stable. The bibtex thing is still under development. But if anybody would be interested in helping plugify them, I'd be more than happy to talk to you. Otherwise, it will probably be a year or two before I have the time to do so myself.

Jefficus
This has been an opinion, brought to you by the fine people at Jefficus World.
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