Where Wasi Last

[Gah, naming this was painful]

WHERE WAS I LAST?

One of the problems I run into when using the Wiki is remembering what discussions I want to check on.

What I hadn't realized (and nobody told me, though they may have hung a note someplace I ought to have seen it), is that FullSearch can be used to help. By signing my WikiName to my comments, I can count on FullSearch to show me what I've been looking into recently.

Surely doing a backlink search from your homepage is the way to do this? Unless your name isn't a WikiName or you don't have a homepage, of course.

Problems:

If somebody deletes my WikiName from the page, the connection will be lost.

It's not clear to me when reading the FullSearch description how often the WikiName search indexes are updated.

Seems to be once per day.

The search results are ordered alphabetically. What I really want would look more like the quick change list - ordered by modification, with timestamps, and the ability to view the recent edit alone, rather than jumping to the page.

Try PaperPorting -- Web Capture the page to a desktop folder and all you have to do is click on it an you'll have the latest rendition of the page. If you want to save the page in its old version, merely duplicate it and rename it before clicking to get latest page. You can also make folders by your own category or topical system. Then you will never have to wonder WhereWasiLast.

I use more than one machine, so this doesn't add anything that my browser's history menu doesn't already give me

Your browser history is different on each machine you use, and a PaperPort rendition is not just a link, but an electronic Printout of the page. I use more than one machine as well, but since they are all on the same network, I can use one PaperPortDirectory? for all of them.

How about keeping a list of pages you're interested in on your homepage? Then you can just surf to the pages and have a look, check the last edit, etc.

This solves the "where was i last" problem, but doesn't address the "what's changed that i'm interested in" problem. To do that this way, there would have to be something like graded colouring of links according to how recently the page changed (blue = hasn't changed in two month -> red = changed in the last hour). And that would be a BadThing.

What might be nice is a combination ForwardLinks and QuickChanges script, that scrapes the outbound links from a page, then concocts a QuickChanges-like page containing just those pages. Better yet, each item in the list would have a link which jumps straight to a view of the last edit.

Neat. I can implement that in TwiciWiki pretty easily. -- TomAnderson

Done. It only took 29 minutes, including documentation (but not including the diff links, as TwiciWiki doesn't yet have history)! Try http://urchin.earth.li/cgi-bin/twic/wiki/localchanges.pl?page=FrontPage and similar URLs. -- ta