Fortunately, the iPhone’s Safari supports bookmarklets, so I whipped up a little bookmarklet that makes it easy to see the real original page in Reader. Here’s how to use it:

1. On your desktop computer, drag the following link onto Safari’s bookmarks toolbar: Super See Original
2. Sync your iPhone
3. Once that’s done, go to Google Reader on your iPhone, and navigate to a blog entry.
4. Hit the bookmark icon at the bottom, then choose Bookmarks Bar > Super See Original
5. The original page for your blog entry should open in a new “tab”!

I have no doubt that the Reader team will eventually make a more iPhone-optimized version of Reader, but until then, hopefully some of you will find this useful.

As I was setting up the blog, found that I really wanted some kind of outboard brain that could help me keep all the people and sites straight, and hopefully provide a useful reference for others. For expediency’s sake, I just used the handy “one-click” install of MediaWiki that DreamHost provides and started typing away. A few weekends later, the Headway Wiki was starting to become something useful—but I was definitely chafing against MediaWiki’s limitations. I found that I generally wanted to represent the same kinds of things about each entry:

• the name of the site
• the web address
• who runs it
• when it was launched (often with some degree of fuzziness, because even the site’s creator doesn’t really remember)
• which agencies it serves

…and a few other miscellaneous things. Unfortunately, MediaWiki is really oriented towards prose—and in fact, I found myself using repetitive prose (with a smattering of bulleted lists) to express these things. Even worse, when I wanted to connect a entry about a third-party transit site to an entry on the agency that it was helping out, I had to manually maintain the link on both ends of the connection. That is, I couldn’t just tell the system that Boston Subway Station Map had information about the MBTA, and have it automatically display that in the MBTA entry—I had to go and edit the MBTA page by hand.

I did make use of MediaWiki’s (apparently) single structural feature: categories. Categories are basically simple tags that you can add to articles, so that the software can automatically generate an index of articles that all share a particular tag. Still, in the end it was far more work than I wanted to do.

There really should be a better way to put together a structured data collection like this, something in between limited expressiveness of MediaWiki and the programming involved in putting together a custom database-backed website using Ruby on Rails or what have you. I’m pretty sure that it’s possible, because I spent several years of my life working on tools like that for the MAYA Information Commons project. Sadly, that work still isn’t available to the general public, so it’s not really a contender here. However, there are a few intriguing new possibilities.

Enter Dabble DB. At first blush, it looked like just the thing that I was looking for. It has what’s probably the best available interface for experimenting with different ways of representing interconnected information. It’s pretty straightforward to create an item, add a few fields to it, and make some of those fields two-way links to other items. That’s no small feat, since my former co-workers and I spent the better part of 2004 building something similar (and if Dreaming in Code is to be believed, the folks on the respected Chandler team were at it for even longer, at around the same time). So far, so good. But after an evening trying to make the Headway data work in Dabble DB, I’ve run into a bunch of significant shortcomings.

No boolean fields

Starting with the smallest thing, there’s no straightforward way to represent a simple checkbox for things like “does this feed contain schedule information”? You can work around this by creating a multiple-choice field with the options “Yes” and “No”, but they’re missing an opportunity to make entering and displaying these fields simpler.

Limited spatial information

Here we are, a couple years after the Google Maps API catalyzed a geographic revolution on the web, and Dabble DB’s only location options are “US or Canadian state/province code” and “Country Code”. To their credit, they do automatically link to a Google Maps search for your term in some cases, but they could provide far more interesting map views if they simply had a lat/lon geocode field and just dumped it into Google maps.

Ontological limitations

It’s very cool that Dabble DB lets you put one item in multiple “categories” (schemas, basically). But in practice, their implementation is less handy than it would seem. Say you had two kinds of things, “websites” and “data providers”, both of which have names (of course) along with other more category-specific fields. If it turns out that you want to represent something that’s both a website and a data provider, and you put both categories on the same object, you end up with two name fields.

You could take a different tack and say that a “data provider” is a specific kind of “website”, so only the website category will have a name field. That’s great, but then there’s no easy way to have the system automatically add the “website” category when you go to create your next “data provider” item. Even worse, when you go to create a new view of your data based on “data providers”, there’s no way to choose to display the “name” field from the “websites” category in the table. (Note: this isn’t strictly true for the name field, since they special-case it so that you always have some kind of identifier, but it’s true for other attributes.)

Rudimentary public views

I could probably work around all those things, but there’s one thing that makes Dabble DB unusable for the Headway data set: the public view is horribly impoverished. Here are the results of my experiments: my lovingly interlinked data has been reduced to a box of yellowing printouts, metaphorically speaking. There’s no apparent way for the viewer to see a single entry laid out in a readable form, let alone follow links between items or search & filter by different attributes.

It’s a shame, because Dabble DB really is the best that I’ve seen so far in most other respects.

Freebase to the rescue?

There’s another contender on the horizon: the wonderfully named Freebase. Tim O’Reilly recently threw a debutante ball for it on his influential blog, and it’s easy to see why it stirred some excitement (and controversy) in the online community. It sounds quite a bit like the things I was working on at MAYA, but with a pleasantly simple web-based interface and without the radical peer-to-peer architecture. On the other hand, it’s hard to say for sure, since the alpha is currently only open to a few fortunate souls, and details are scarce. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to check it out soon.

In the meantime, Dabble DB has a lot of potential, especially since they recently launched their free Creative Commons version (which made it a viable option for Headway). Hopefully, with a few refinements, they’ll be able to turn it into a compelling alternative to developing custom code any time you want to share some interconnected information.

The typical setup in my office is that I have my G5 powering two monitors front and center, and the powerbook beside them, on a (modified) iCurve for ergonomic viewing. While this is great for the displays, it leaves the problem of controlling the laptop. At one point I had a KVM switch set up, but the hassle of plugging in a USB cable and flipping the switch led me to just type un-ergonomically on the laptop’s keyboard.

Then I came across Synergy. It’s a cross-platform tool that lets you send your keyboard and mouse commands to other machines on your network–sort of like VNC without the screen-sharing (since the other screen is right in front of you). The Synergy team’s most brilliant innovation, though, is the interface for switching machines. Basically, you can configure your machines so that when you roll your mouse pointer off the edge of one machine’s screen, it magically appears on the corresponding edge of a different machine’s screen. You can roll your mouse from your Linux box across your Windows box over to your Mac in one smooth motion. It’s like the way that multi-monitor setups work, except that under the hood it’s seamlessly switching to sending your input to another machine over the network.

I’ve been using Synergy for a few months now, but it’s not without its rough edges. Last time I did it, configuration was a text-editing affair, though the SynergyKM preference pane add-on for Mac OS X makes things much more automatic. I also tended to experience general glitchiness on OS X. A vestigial mouse pointer would often remain on my main monitor, twitching distractingly, as I controlled the laptop. It also didn’t handle modifier and function keys, meaning I still had to press the function keys on the laptop directly to trigger Exposé.

Enter Teleport. While (or perhaps because) it’s Mac-only, it solves most of the problems I had with Synergy. The configuration is a breeze (using Rendezvous AKA Bonjour), and input forwarding is smooth and comprehensive. It also seems to automatically sync clipboards well, something that I was using Erik Lagercrantz’s ClipboardSharing utility for until he failed to update it for Tiger.

So far, I only have a few minor critiques. First, it doesn’t appear to allow you to put two remote screens side-by-side–the remote screens must be adjacent to the main computer’s screens. Also, it seems to hit the disk every time I roll over the boundary between two machines, which is audibly distracting and causes an annoying delay in which mouse motion isn’t counted on the new screen. Even so, I think it will be a part of my desktop setup from now on. Thanks Julien!

A bookmarklet is a browser bookmark which contains a glob of JavaScript code instead of a URI, so that it becomes a little program which operates on the page you’re currently viewing. In the case of LibraryLookup, it scours the web page you’re looking at for an ISBN number, which it then feeds to your library catalog so that you can jump directly to the listing there.

The Minuteman Library Network is an umbrella organization for many local libraries in the Boston area, including my own Cambridge Public Library. They recently changed their catalog format, and I updated the bookmarklet to work with the new system—here’s the result:

library

To “install” it, just drag the “library” link above to your bookmarks bar. Then, next time you’re looking at some random book on the web, click the “library” bookmarklet and you’ll get a popup showing whether it’s available at any of the Minuteman branches and giving you the ability to reserve it. Enjoy!

Update: It’s worth mentioning that I had some problems posting the bookmarklet code in WordPress for a bit—it turned out that it was eating the backslash characters when saving. I replaced each backslash with %5c, which fixed the issue.

(Update) Unsurprisingly, free-text geocoding is fraught with peril:

Why The Incrementalist? Well, after reading Rands’s excellent essay on Incrementalists & Completionists, I realized that the role that I generally play at MAYA is generally that of the former. And my experiences working on buskarma and YouRepresentUs have convinced me that it’s often possible to build something which isn’t perfect, but which makes the world an ever-so-slightly better place. In addition, the Pebble Soup effect often kicks in once you’ve got something up and running—it’s much more rewarding to contribute a marginal improvement to something that’s already functional. And besides, the master plan is almost never completely right. We still need the dreamers to point us toward the horizon, but the best way to get there will always be one step at a time.