The LogiLogi Foundation - Home

Simple API

2009-06-29T18:40:00Z

LogiLogi has a simple API for creating and exporting documents (logis) now. It is compatible with the Blogger API, though the authentication part is not yet. Logis are exported and and imported in Atom format. Go here for an example of a logi in this format.

Matching the API the LLRemote gem library was released for use in scripts that consume it. In addition an example script was created for exporting latex documents to LogiLogi. It is called LaTex LogiLogi Remote (t-llre.rb) and available here. I used it for uploading and updating my history thesis.

In a few days (4th of juli) we will be presenting the difference between LogiLogi and Philosource/Philospace at the ECAP 2009 conference in Barcelona.

Over the summer we will continue improving LogiLogi. We will especially be adding something to keep track of comments and new logis, and what we will call read-paths (chains of logis), so LogiLogi becomes practical to use when a bit busier, and also for texts that are a bit longer.

In addition I will be writing my philosophy thesis on LogiLogi, and on LogiLogi :) (in both meanings)

LogiLogi at the Philosophers Rally

2009-05-15T08:41:00Z

The Philosophers Rally – The Future of Philosophy was a vibrant, interesting, local conference. We had many interesting discussions, and there were good talks to attend, not just of the keynote speakers such as David Gamez, but also of Johnny Søraker, on virtual worlds, of Marleen Moors, on technology, certainty and death, and of David Koepsell, on copyrights in the nano-age.

And of course LogiLogi was also presented at the Rally (slides available here). We had an average audience, and received some good questions, especially by David Gamez on community building. Charl Linssen, an occasional developer of LogiLogi, and I also met again in person at the rally, and we had some good conversations, and a few beers together at the campus bar… In all it was a nice conference, and LogiLogi was received positively by those present.

(picture thanks to Charl)

Eating my Thesis on LogiLogi

2009-05-04T09:07:00Z

I will be writing my Ba-thesis for history on LogiLogi. It is about the justifiability of Intellectual Property, given the historic and technological developments since the introduction of copyright- and patent-laws.

So yes, I will be eating my own dogfood :-) Not just the final version will be put on-line, but I will write it incrementally and in the open, as it develops. This even though the end-product will still have to be a pdf paper-simulation that can guise as a normal article and be printed and all (to jack into the university system).

With it, as one of the people behind LogiLogi, of course I hope to learn what works and what doesn’t in LogiLogi, and thus how LogiLogi might be improved, but also to have a valuable discussion on Intellectual Property, a subject that is very important to the future of philosophy and free deliberation, and for the kind of society that we and our children may hope to live in.

Some of the challenges could be the neatly splitting up of things into logis of max 1.000 words, and keeping the set of tags for each part meaningful. In addition it will be a challenge to balance between the multi-dimensionality of hypertext and the need for a linear ordering of everything in the final paper version. Also – and I need your help with this – I hope we can see how things work out if more logis compete, and people with different ideas and concepts add tags to their logis, testing how the freely growing folksonomy can turn into something sensible.

And last but not least I expect to find quite a grotesque collection of bugs and some fascinating possible improvements, and balancing my time between improving LogiLogi and feeding the paper version to my prof on time, might become a small challenge too :)

So feel welcome to join our dogfood dinner on LogiLogi, where you’ll find a warm intellectual atmosphere, delicious patent-dishes, copyright-salads, and other intellectual food, and oh, yes, please don’t forget to bring your own ideas and opinions; brains are welcome.

LogiLogi in London, Kings College

2009-04-28T18:57:00Z

It has been rather silent for almost two months now, but we haven’t been idle, and there’s more good to come. I, Wybo, a core-developer and author of most writings on this blog, have been working hard in the last few months (and will for some months to come) to finish my Ba-degrees at the University of Groningen. This because as of September I will be doing the Digital Humanities MA at Kings College London.

Now Kings College London is not bad, as the Brits would say, but the coolest thing about it all is the subject matter of the MA (& also what makes it relevant for this blog), as Digital Humanities at Kings is just the thing to do and the place to go for improving LogiLogi, and for working on systems like it!

For example among others John Bradley, the creator of the desktop note tool Pliny, and Michele Pasin, one of the persons behind CoHere are working there. And then there’s Willard McCarty, one of the foremost thinkers on humanities computing, and many more people that I have not met yet, or only shortly, and whom I will, or hope to, meet there soon :)

Also when speaking more broadly, Digital Humanities is a very promising and socially useful field. Promising because whereas for example in physics a digital revolution has already happened, in the Humanities, because of their different and complex needs, there is still a lot to do and to discover.

And it is useful for society because applications and improvements for Historians and Philosophers – when successful – can have more extensive and profound consequences for culture and the human condition than those for physics and maths, on whose faculties, and to whose needs Computer Science has historically developed. So it’s not just interesting and fun, it’s a good thing to work on too.

On a more personal note I am happy to have heard today that my studying at Kings will be made possible by a HSP-Talentenbeurs scholarship of the Nuffic, the Dutch organisation for international cooperation in higher education.

So there is more to come, and LogiLogi, and hopefully this world too, will continue to become better all the time, bit by bit.

FOSDEM 09 presentation & @ Philosophers Rally

2009-02-09T21:14:00Z

The FOSDEM was pretty amazing. The Friday night Beer-event was overwhelming to say the least, and on saturday morning there was a very interesting keynote talk on the future of ‘Free and Open’ with many applications moving into the cloud by Mark Surman, of the Mozilla Foundation.

And there were many other good talks, of which for us quite a few were on sunday in the Ruby and Rails developer room.

I arrived there before 10 in the morning, after having had another interesting evening at the Gnome beer event (as for being dwarfish or involved in the Gnome project, I’m quite tall, and only a normal user of the windowmanager). But I had some good chats there, and of course good Belgian beer, especially the Früli strawberry beer.

...anyway, but back to Sunday. A particulary good talk was the one by Peter Vanbroekhoven on the object model of Rails.

We also gave our presentation on sunday, on LogiLogi, the importance of freedom on the Brave New Web, and on the three Rails plugins: Thorny Form, Magick Corners and Body Builder. The sheets can be downloaded here (as pdf, sources here).

Some further good news is that LogiLogi will be presented at the Philosophers Rally 2009 – The Future of Philosophy conference which is held in Enschede on the 12th and 13th of May. This is a conference by and for philosophers, so we are really looking forward to this presentation, and to discussing LogiLogi with them.

Body Builder Rails Plugin

2009-02-07T12:06:00Z

The third and last Rails plugin of the plugin triathlon before our presentation tomorrow at the FOSDEM conference is the Body Builder plugin.

This plugin fixes the problem of how to organize the parts of your app that are re-used like blocks across pages, like those in side-bars and top-bars. It allows you to create render-points where content can be inserted in views. In short it allows one to set body_parts (variables that can be yielded in views) from controllers. Also since Rails components are notoriously slow, this is a nice alternative.

After installing the plugin you can declare body parts in your controllers (most often only in controllers/application.rb) with: body_parts :top, :sidebar. Then you can fill them up in the same, or in inheriting controllers by passing method syms to body- name_body, just like Rails filters: top_body :navigation_bar. The return value of these methods will be added to the body.

Then in the view you can display the body with <= yield :sidebar_body %> resp. <= yield :top_body %>. As you can see Body Builder supports multiple, user-defined bodies. This contrary to the SimpleSidebar plugin. See the full Body Builder docs for code examples and installation instructions.

Magick Corners Rails Plugin

2009-02-06T12:00:00Z

Our second Rails Plugin to be released is Magick Corners. It is for adding Scalable Vector Graphics as backgrounds to dom- elements without a hassle. It can scale and stretch them to size, and also generate them for simple cases like a div with rounded corners.

After installing the plugin you can apply rounded corners to any dom-object (only divs are officially supported) using css-selectors, like: mcorners = new MagickCorners(); mcorners. add(‘div.logi_body’). And also display any SVG image as the background of divs of any size with: mcorners.add(‘div.add_tag’, {‘scaled_image’ : ‘add_tag.svg’}). Images are scaled/folded to suit. See the full Magick Corners docs for a code example and detailed installation instructions.

Thorny Form Rails Plugin

2009-02-05T21:33:00Z

Over three days we will be releasing Rails Plugins extracted from LogiLogi.org in a little Plugin Triathlon. And then on Sunday, the fourth day, we will present the three of them (at least two, three if time permits) in the Ruby and Rails room of the FOSDEM in Brussels. And the first one is released today. It is Thorny Form

Thorny Form is a Rails plugin for unobtrusively protecting forms against form-SPAM. It adds extra fields like a honeypot and some others which can then be checked before the form-data is used in your application. It is not an unbreakable solution, but it is likely to continue to work for quite some time. The following joke from Ned Batchelders blog nicely sketches why:

Jim and Joe are out hiking in the forest, when in the distance, they see a huge bear. The bear notices them, and begins angrily running toward them. Jim calmly checks the knots of his shoes and stretches his legs.

Joe asks incredulously, “What are you doing? Do you think you can outrun that bear!?”

Jim replies, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

To use Thorny Form you just need to change two lines per form. First in the view form_for has to be replaced by thorny_form_for (remote_form_for by remote_thorny_form_for). Then in the controller you have to add a check for spam in the shape of self.thorny_form_free_of_spam?. See the full Thorny Form docs for a code example and installation instructions.

Merry Gems and a Happy, Free new Year :)

2008-12-31T17:42:00Z

This week we released 3 ruby-gems. They were extracted from LogiLogi. As the site is mostly working now, it seemed time to do all those little cleanups and todo’s that were still left. And thus, during Christmas I sat with my laptop on my lap in the livingroom (what else are laptops laptops for ? :), cleaning things up, and preparing the release of some re-usable parts of LogiLogi as gems.

The first gem is Diff Longest Common Substring, our diff algoritm that can not just find additions and removals of text, but also text that has moved around. The second is Position Range, a helper-gem for DiffLCS, which models a Range to which random attributes can be assigned, and which can easily be manipulated in PositionRange::Lists using standard set operations. And the last is Text Weaver a library to weave html-tags into texts. This one is used by LogiLogi to add the separately stored links and remarks back into the logis for display.

All of them are under the Affero GPL, which means they will remain free, and can only be used in sites that are also under the Affero GPL, and thus whose source can be downloaded and is Free Software. They are all hosted on Rubyforge.

Around the 3rd week of January we will also be releasing some really nifty Rails-plugins with tutorials on how to use them. But for now we wish you all a Happy and Free new Year.

Grant, Article, and Ready for more widespread Use

2008-12-11T13:26:00Z

Last monday we heard that we will receive a small grant from OFSET for the develoment and hosting of LogiLogi. Ofset is an international foundation, mostly based in France, that promotes Free Software for schools and uni’s. We are very happy with it, and will use it well!

Also yesterday our first paper on LogiLogi (presented at the Digital Humanities 2008 conference) appeared in the journal of the student association of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen; the Qualia. The newest edition is not yet online, but will be soon.

And last but not least, with the addition of invites for peergroups, and a welcoming e-mail for new users (and the fixing of some bad IE bugs ;-) LogiLogi is now finally ready for more general use. So while we have been hesitant with spreading the word before, as of now, please tell your friends about LogiLogi, and spread the word!

LogiLogi in one paragraph:

LogiLogi tries to find an informal middle-road between good conversations and journal-papers by providing a form of quick, informal publication and annotation of short texts. It does not make use of forum-threads (avoiding their many problems), but of tags and links that can also be added to texts by others than the original author. It is intended for all those ideas that you’re unable to turn into a full sized paper, but that you deem too interesting to leave to the winds.

LogiLogi Manta working in IE7

2008-11-19T21:43:00Z

LogiLogi Manta is as of today also working in Internet Explorer Seven (keeping fingers crossed). Supporting IE7, together with Firefox 3, which was already supported, means that about 70% of web-surfers can now use LogiLogi without problems. Which is, well, not that bad percentage for an interesting app like this one.

We will improve the usability of LogiLogi a bit more with things like simple (non-OpenID) accounts and invites to peergroups over the coming days / weeks. Then we will do a bit more PR so you and others can actually find and enjoy it :)

In the meantime, please let us know if anything is not working as expected.

A comparison of LogiLogi and Talia

2008-11-19T18:56:00Z

We’d like to let you know that another paper about LogiLogi has been written. It is about the differences between LogiLogi and Talia/Philospace. It was written by Wybo Wiersma, of LogiLogi, and Stefano David, who is working with Talia; and for the Digital Humanities 2009 Conference. You can download and read the paper here.

LogiLogi Manta Live with real UI!

2008-10-30T13:28:00Z

After weeks of thinking, tinkering, designing, discussion and development it’s finally there; LogiLogi Manta with a new UI. For the first time – we hope – it’s now possible to call Manta usable. At least somewhat :)

It’s still a very basic UI, and there’s more functionality to come, but at least the basics work, and seem to be working well from an usability perspective. Currently the only supported browser is Firefox, but in some weeks we will add support for IE 7 too.

Also we will be improving things and adding some new features (like RSS feeds and simple stats), so if you encounter bugs, things fit for improvement, or have ideas on features, please let us know.

Big thanks to all who have contributed to LogiLogi, and special thanks to Bruno Sarlo, Miguel Lezama and Wybo Wiersma for much of the design & integration work…

Below is a screenshot, and you can view it in full size, working & interactive and all, here (you have Firefox, don’t you ?).

Software Freedom Day & New UI

2008-09-14T17:55:00Z

Yesterday we were at the Software Freedom Day kickoff in Baarn, the Netherlands. We gave a presentation there on Freedom on the Brave New Web, and on LogiLogi.org, and a bit on our current efforts to make it usable to the max. It went well, and there also was a nice discussion afterward.

The slides of our presentation can be found here. A video might also become available, and in any case here is already a pre-view of the new UI we’re (Bruno, Wybo & Charles here and there :) making (full size here):

FKFT in Barcelona and Web Freedom & Stallman again

2008-07-22T21:13:00Z

And the FKFT was a great experience too. I’m typing this some days after the conference while waiting during the night at the Airport for my early-morning flight to Amsterdam. A few days after the fact because not just the conference was great: Barcelona also is; I love this city. It’s one of the best of Europe: grandiose architecture; not just Gaudi, but everywhere, public culture, statutes, museums, street-music, a fast and cheap metro sytem, good food & bars, and did I mention the weather ? Hmoah! :)

Anyway, enough about urban paradise: the Free Knowledge, Free Technology conference was organized by the Free Knowledge Institute: the creators of the SELF-platform: a site for collaboratively creating teaching-materials. And this platform was a topic many interesting presentations were on: especially their approach to diffs, and the Gnowledge-system that runs their concept-map are worth a look (had good conversations with both their creators).

Besides our own, which went well again :) (slides are here, sources in svn), another interesting presentation was by the Vibal Foundation (ran by a publishing-house) from the Phillipines. They run a bunch of interesting projects, like a Wikipedia-like site with more relaxed rules, and do this in the spirit of their local needs and circumstances, like being a formerly oral culture. Also the talks by Stephen Downes and Anne Østergaard were interesting.

And last but not least there was a speech of Richard Stallman again, at the beginning of the conference, on the first day. During the question-round he was ehm; quite harsh and sometimes even hostile (must admit that some in the audience were a bit so too). But afterwards we did get a chance to talk a bit: what it comes down to is that while Stallman does see possibilities for freedom in Web-/ Software-as-a-service-communities, he believes this freedom to be a lesser, and thus not a good (or no) freedom to strive for. In this sense he still thinks one should not rely on another’s machine to “do calculations with ones data”, with which, I think we disagree on 2 points:

First of all this “lesser freedom of the web” is not so much less. As we proposed it: all code of the web-app under the Affero GPL, all content under a CC-By-Sa license, and rights for the user-community over the running application. Freedom on these 3 planes allows the community to determine it’s course, and to leave and start anew (exodus/fork) in case this fails or there is no agreement possible. Pretty close to the rights of citizens in good societies I would say.
Secondly the web is good and useful, and can do things desktop pc’s can’t do. For example be accessed on any device and machine, anywhere, give users ease of not having to install and update the software, model social networks that can be collaboratively extended, and allow for all kinds of rating, tagging and sharing. In short the web is not evil, the web is just social, and when the serf-like conditions that many Web2.0 app-users are under now (they’re even being sold wit the app, as serfs were sold with the land in historic times) are replaced by social freedoms, the web will be a better place.

In short: social software requires social freedoms. Discuss it with us on LogiLogi.