[seul-edu] Software Links

["Prevett, Larry" <Prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us>]

Les,

this message was prompted by that update to the ISETL link 
I mentioned in a previous post.

When Doug (and others, myself included) first started putting
software links in the wiki it was curious to me because I'd
never seen it done before (using a wiki as a kind of database).
Now that all those links are in there, I've found it's very
useful because if you are having some discussion about software,
you can just do a [name] link on your wiki page to that software page.

As I've said before, I'm glad you've migrated that info into a
fullblown database because I think it is a more flexible and stable
platform for a software list.

So I'm thinking about several ways to enhance and improve this
connection between the 'ad hoc' information in the wiki and
the more formal information in the database.

Bruno has implemented a new feature in the wiki where one can
'subscribe' to the wiki. I haven't tried it yet but the idea is that
whenever someone posts something to the wiki it automatically gets 
mailed to a subscriber. This might be an opportunity to experiment 
with getting rid of some 'bad redundancy' while maintaining some of
the effects of 'good redundancy' that were discussed a while back.

If you, or someone in the coalition appointed to maintain
software links, were to subscribe to the wiki, then any adhoc
comments or updated info made to the wiki pages could automatically
be sent to that person so they could easily make the changes in the
Schoolforge Application Database. (Of course they would also get
other changes made in the wiki besides software.)

At some point in the future, it might even be possible to use a perl script
to parse and filter that wiki update and automatically import information  
about software links and comments directly into the Schoolforge Application
Database, what do you think?

L. Prevett
Mathematics Instructor
Cochise College, Sierra Vista, AZ, US
prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us