Essentially, this page is about three things:

• The design goals I had in mind i.e. the whole draft phase I went through before I even wrote the first line of code.
• A guide for all three parts (read here for what they are) of my website/platform. This guide tells and explains how to read the website i.e. it tells about certain integral parts of the platform/website that help navigate, gain focus as well as overview and explains their meaning.
• Last but not least, there is a detailed explanation for those who want to build something akin to my website. I will explain, in detail, how the platform works from a technical point of view and what kind of software I use and the way I use it.

Design Goals I had in Mind

This section is about what I had in mind when I was drafting my new, at least for the next two decades net-presence. The ideas and the desire to build something from scratch actually had been a long-time matter to me since I had stuff on the net before this website was born but nothing ever felt quite right to me.

It either had a nice user interface but a bad backend or it was the other way around. Plain and simple, anything I used before the current setup sucked a lot. Now, with Muse, it is like Heaven opens up and angels start singing...

The crucial Key Element

One big issue had always been that even though I already had one application (GNU Emacs) that blurred the boarders between different tasks I had to do,

/start interjection

I do not have to leave GNU Emacs — emailing, writing papers/documentation/theses/etc, chatting, programming, listening to musing, surfing the web, using the CLI (Command Line Interface) to control my computer, administer remote machines in some DC (Data Center) thousands of miles away, viewing photo albums etc., I do all from within GNU Emacs.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
      — Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)

That is exactly the gain from what one gets when he integrates all the afore mentioned with GNU Emacs. I work at speeds a usual I-use-a-different-application-for-any-task user can just dream of just because of that unique interface to all the tasks I need to carry out and the inherent nature of Emacs itself. With Emacs, anything is just a few keystrokes away.

/end interjection

anytime I wanted to put something on the net, I had to leave that powerful environment and, for example, do some sort of copy paste from application A to application B in order to get my information on the net.

In fact, I am pretty sure that exactly why most folks end up being utterly unproductive respectively find themselves putting a lot less stuff on the net as they thought they would.

Question: How often have you seen folks setting up some fancy out of the box blogging/wiki/journal/business report/etc. software but then, after the first four months of frisson or so, they simply stopped to emit information to the net (or some other places for that matter).

I have been there with weblogs, wikis, groupware and many other applications and stuff — it simply does not work in the long-term since folks are lazy animals. Being a lazy animal is understandable. Why should one have almost twice the work just for putting stuff on the net?! The usual copy paste, restructure and reformat, switching workspaces and making use of the nonsense computer mouse simply is no fun — understandably you get lazy... you stop doing it. I have been there... Now I do things once and that is it. That is how it should be. If it is not for you then take actions...

So, as I explained, one crucial element during my drafting phase had been

How can I integrate a framework, one that allows me to set up, handle content I/O to the platform/website and manage the whole shebang, all with a single interface? And of course, I want it to be integrated into my working environment in order to avoid redundancy!

After I looked around, tried a few possible solutions and evaluated them I figured, that a platform/website build from scratch by using GNU Emacs and Muse perfectly fits my needs.

Functionality

Technology needs to be functional i.e. I am not talking about the functionality paradigms as if the reader where another computer scientist and we might have an interesting dialog about algorithms and programming languages and the like. I am talking about the functionality from a users point of view i.e. usability. Probably the most and interesting way to look at it like an architect¹.

On purpose, I am not going to dive into theory on usability and the like right now. I am rather going to keep this brief and simple. For me, a lot happened intuitively (some call that talent) and based on experience (my own as a user to technology and because of the dialog with users I created technology for in the past). Of course, hard facts played their part as well (follow the usability link above). So, for me, coming up with a functionality draft was a bit like

A young man wrote to Mozart and said:

Q: "Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any
    suggestions as to how to get started?"
A: "A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with
    some simple Lieder and work your way up to a symphony."
Q: "But Herr Mozart, you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old."
A: "True, but I never asked anybody how to do it."

I am pretty bad with music in general aside from listening. Anyhow, I think, was either born with some sort of talent to encapsulate technology for the laymen or it happened I just developed that talent over time.

Love on first sight or not, that is it. Whenever humans discover something new, they hate it or love it after the first five or so minutes — anything that comes later in time just adds to the initial impression i.e. something you love after the first five minutes is not something you hate a year later and something that you dislike at the beginning will never be your favorite piece of technology.

We live in a meritocracy where time is money or at least has become more important (subjectively) than say 30 years ago. Many people are simply overwhelmed by the amount of information that falls on their heads — same as a big waterfall does not allow you to breath when you are standing at its bottom — at any time the go on the net. Many get lost in time and have a feeling of loosing control over themselves while being on the net.

I have been there, suffered a lot but finally got my turn. I am now in control of what information sources I use, how I use them and I have also settled on certain tools I use to consume/distribute information in order to work as effective as possible i.e. saving as much time as possible by getting the most possible out of every minute being on the net.

Time

I am praying this over and over again. Time is an utterly precious thing. Because of this fact, a mandatory design criteria had been to save me, my contributors and the random visitor as much as possible time as we deal with this platform.

Manageability

Graphics

Color

Wiki Part

Page elements and their meaning — this section explains the different elements in place in order to guide/aid humans as the walk around on this platform/website and thus make the sessions they spend on this website as effective as possible for them.

Element - Possession / What is it about

With just a few lines, I wanted to inform the reader about

• Who is responsible for this website. Is it a money driven here-you-read-what-is-best-for-our-stocks commercial entity or some independent organization or a single person or a group of activists etc. who runs a certain platform.
• What is this website about — that is important since people have a desire to know what kind of information they can expect in order to decide if it is interesting for them to continue. One should be able to decide after ~20 seconds if he stays or leaves a platform. Try this with a random website/platform... mostly you find yourself looking for and answer to What the heck is this website about? after already surfing this mess for ten minutes or more.
• Make a statement about the current state of the website.

The final result can be seen below (upper right corner of any of the pages on my website). It would make no sense to just put it on the Welcome Page since folks hand around links to various pages from this website. If it happens somebody is pointed to a page behind the Welcome Page, he might also have the desire for all the afore mentioned.

Element - Website Sections

It has somehow became a convention that one puts a menu on the left-hand side of a website. In fact, it appears to me, if you ask ten people, seven or more will tell you they expect a menu at the left-hand side.

The Website Sections element provides fast access to some of the pages on this platform/website. Of all pages this website has, you can access a few at any times via the left-hand side menu since the Website Sections element is embedded into any page.

Think of the website as of a bucket. This bucket contains lots of Easter eggs (the various pages on this website). Some of the eggs are on top of all others (the ones which are menu items within the Website Section element). All other eggs in the bucket can be looked at too — they are simple not on top so one needs to dig a little deeper. To take look at all pages on this website, just view them all, alphabetically listed, at the page called Welcome Page. This page lists all pages on the website — the ones in the Website Section and all the rest.

In the future, there may be items that not just point to some page but to some other software which I am going to integrate into this platform.

Element - Table of Contents

The Table of Contents element is something that I am totally rapturous for — I simply love it. Like a book, it lists headlines of the contents of a particular page and shows the relations (section, subsection, subsubsection etc.) to each another. The only difference to a book is that this is about a single page rather than a whole book with a serious of pages.

I simply implemented what I like about books. First thing I do, I read the abstract and second to that I read the table of contents. I wanted that for my platform to since I know folks are going to love it. It eases the decision Do I dive deeper into that page or do I move on to some other page? I saves humans time and that is important.

Element - Page Information Corner

Every page on this website has a, what I call it, Page Information Corner. This corner consists of several parts, each one telling something about the current page. Generally, it is made up of a few stacked elements. From top to bottom, there is:

Page Title

I always pick some descriptive titles thus the title page line is a very brief description of what a particular page is all about.

Status Line

It carries two types of information. First of all the color. There are three possible colors — green, yellow and red. I have chosen those not just for graphical reasons but also because I wanted to pick something that folks are familiar with... i.e. those are the colors we know from traffic lights. Their meaning is quite the same with this platform.

• Green denotes all fine or go or now it is your turn. Green tells the reader, that this page is considered finished so he might not find some unresolved/unclear things on this page.
• Yellow tells the reader that this is something in between green and red which we all know means I can go now but I better be attentive. In fact, what it really denotes with regards to this website is, that this page is work in progress — some of its sections might be considered finished and others might not have even been touched by the author so far. Some pages however might stay on yellow forever since they cover subjects of constant changes or they are used permanently to put notes and information onto them. Bottom line is, just go ahead, dive into yellow pages but be aware, that this is work in progress.
• Red, the opposite of green. It denotes that this page is in place but the author has not started to fill it with contents. However, pages with red status lines might contain contents but those are just notes with just rough structuring if at all. It is more a dumping place for notes where the author puts things (notes, images, etc.) for future writing/editing the page i.e. going to yellow and finally to green.

So, to summarize, a page starts its life with being red, after somebody picked it up to work on it, it goes to yellow and when it is finally considered finished except for reviews and such, it has become a green page.

The second type of information the status line provides to the reader is some sort of note to further indicate what is currently going on with this particular page — if we just take a look at the thumbnails below, we might get a good notion about what I am talking about. What I like especially about it is that I can take individual care per page instead of being forced into a few possible choices. In fact, this approach is as individual as speech can be...

Pagecode

This line accumulates further information about the current page. I explain its meaning onto another page.

Last changed

This line gets updated automatically every time someone makes a change to the current page. It does not make a difference if someone added/deleted tens of lines or just fixed a typo — a change is a change and so the timestamp gets updated... automatically...

Abstract

Well, what to say about it? An abstract is an abstract — the next deepening into the content of some page after the title line. From the authors point of view, an abstract is very important. Usually it starts with some plastic idea — brainstorming deluxe... At next, one forms some expressible fragments which he then transforms and merges into a meaningful abstract.

During the author writes an abstracts, he gets further ideas and clarifies things before he moves on to write the page/thesis/paper or whatever kind of writing he does. For me, an abstract is just one, but an utterly important, step that I take whenever I write something like this page or even more sophisticated.

Finally, I would like to provide the reader with a Source Code View of what I described above. The below screenshot shows at what I look when I write/manage this platform with GNU Emacs. One can see the source code for the SCM page on this website in the left-hand window. The right window is split into three subwindows of which the topmost shows that I am using Emacs as if I were walking a common CLI (Command Line Interface) i.e. I use ansi-term mode which provides me with an interface to my underlying OS (Operating System)... same as one gets when using the some sort of shell e.g. Bash from within a console or terminal.

The window in the middle shows Occur mode. I use it to print all headlines of the page in the left-hand window (the one that shows the SCM page source) so I get a good overview during writing and I can quick navigate to whatever headline I want. The window at the bottom shows all of my current buffers with the running Emacs session with some additional information like file path and the like.

Anyways, the thing I wanted to draw the readers attention to are the first few lines in the left-hand window. As can be seen, those are exactly the ones that I explained above.

There is just one line I did not cover above. I did not because it is of no importance to the reader — just for the hacker who writes a page. The #contentdepth 2 determines to what depth headlines would go into the table of contents. A contentdepth of 2 lists sections and subsections but does not descend further down e.g. to subsubsections or even deeper into the page structure. If I wanted that I had to specify #contentdepth 3. Again, take a look at the Occur buffer — same thing... it lists the headlines. However, the beautiful thing here is, I can determine the contentdepth on a per page basis rather than globally for the whole website/platform... that is lovely with two yummy cherries on top ;-]

Schedule Part

About what the schedule is and why I have one can be read on the dedicated page. This section rather explains how to read/use the schedule for folks (coworkers, family, friends etc.) that wanted to get a notion about my schedule and my to do list and the like.

This section does not come with a great deal of tech speech since it is targeted to the laymen. It is easy to understand the few symbols and specifics I have in place with my schedule so anybody should be able to understand the meaning of tasks and notes after he skimmed through this section.

The benefit will then be a significant increase in efficiency on both sides — mine and anybody who becomes a regular visitor to my schedule i.e. since all my schedule information is on the net, this reduces the need for further communication about appointments, tasks, notes, deadlines etc. to almost zero.

Day Pages and Plan Pages

There are two different types of pages with my schedule. First there are so called Day Pages (first image below) and second to that there are Plan Pages (second image).

Day pages show tasks and notes on a per day basis whereas plan pages show tasks and notes in context to some project and the like. However, a task or note may show up on both or just onto one of them depending if the task/note

• is scheduled on a particular day (Day Page)
• is part of a bigger context e.g. a project (Plan Page)
• is part of a bigger context AND is scheduled on a particular day (Plan Page and Day Page)

As can be seen from the screenshots, I initially designed and finally implemented all parts (wiki, weblog and schedule) to come with the same set of basic elements for navigation and overall orientation on my platform. The elements I am speaking in particular right now are

• Element - Possession / What is it about
• Element - Website Sections
• Element - Table of Contents
• Element - Page Information Corner

I have already explained them above so please go there if you want to read about them again or if you have not so far. However, with the schedule part there are some parts of the Page Information Corner element that are missing (Pagecode and Abstract) compared to the wiki part but that is simply because they are not needed with the schedule part.

The Sections of Plan respectively Day Pages

Both, day and plan pages are divided into sections. Some of those sections are written by me and others are automatically filled by Planner. Planner uses the data from my PIM (Personal Information Manager) system to create those sections.

As we already know from above, plan and day pages may carry the same information (tasks and notes) i.e. a task/note may show up on a plan page AND a day page (compare the two images below). In fact a task/note can show up on several plan pages and one day page if it is a task that is in context with several projects (one plan page per project) and if the task is also scheduled to a particular day.

Plan Pages

Plan pages are divided into sections (see screenshot above). Those sections are

• Defining the Purpose
• Envisioning the Outcome
• Index of Note Headlines
• Notes
• Organizing / Project Plan
• Tasks

How come they are GTD compliant is mentioned at the top of any plan page with links to the GTD page. The image below shows a plan page with the afore mentioned sections. It also carries one task and one note — the same one as the day page below does.

Day Pages

Day pages have the following sections

• Schedule
• Index of Note Headlines
• Notes
• Tasks

The last three are identical to the section of a plan page. They are not just identical but as I mentioned above, the carry the same information as their twin sections on plan pages.

For all of those three, no matter if one looks at them via a day or plan page, they show the same information if a task is scheduled to a particular plan page AND a particular day page.

The first section i.e. Schedule is specific to day pages and also not part of the GTD (Getting Things Done) principle but it is part of Planner and I use it on a regular. The Schedule section lists my appointments respectively tasks that go with a particular time e.g. I am doing Sport from 9-10pm as can be seen from the screenshot below. As the screenshot shows, the Schedule section is even more specific about time than the task or notes section since it also puts a specific time to things I have to do respectively that are upcoming appointments.

Notes

Plan as well as Day pages can have notes. I already said that notes as well as tasks can show up on either day pages or plan pages or both at once.

There is nothing special about notes. Those notes as can be seen from the screenshots above are like normal notes one might note down onto a sheet of paper using a pen. The only difference, but then that is not specific to notes, is that all is linked to other pages so one can quickly navigate around from notes on day pages to notes on plan pages or to tasks on either plan and/or day pages or links might even point outside my website into Wikipedia or somewhere else on the net.

That is just for the to-the-net-published PIM (Personal Information Manager) data somebody looks at via his web browser but for me, as I use Planner from within GNU Emacs (image below) the magic does not stop there — I can create links from my plan/day pages directly to pages on my wiki or into some email message or some chat conversation I had the other day... In fact, it is simply breathtaking what an Emacs wizard can do if he likes to ;-]

The only thing left to mention about notes is that they have a number assigned to them — starting at #1. As can be best seen above, notes also have a timestamp i.e. depending if we look at the note on a plan or day page it shows the creating date and time or just the time. Also, every note has a heading and, as said before links to all pages (plan and day pages) that carry this particular note.

Tasks

Next to notes, tasks are the main concern of Planner. I already mentioned above that a task can be on plan and day pages at once. This subsection will explain how to read the task information which is actually trivial to grasp.

There are two images below that show exactly the same tasks. Tasks also have the same status etc. In fact, the only difference is that the first image shows one group containing all tasks whereas the second image shows three groups with tasks distributed among all three.

The reason I put this two images here is to show that it is possible to group tasks i.e. every group is delimited by others with a blank line. Planner looks at each group separately and sorts tasks depending on their rank and status.

So why the grouping? Well, simply because it makes sense since it is just another level of taxonomy next to contexts (context lists/pages that is) — even though, this level of taxonomy is more fine grained. In other words, it would be possible to split a single group into two groups by simply putting a blank line in between and add headlines to each group telling about the subject of each group.

Priority respectively Rank

The priority respectively rank of some task indicate how far away from being accomplished some task might be. Without going into detail, there is a dependency between Importance, Urgency and the Rank of a particular task. Further on, there is also dependency between the Rank of some tasks and its Priority.

In fact, I provide two inputs whenever I add a new task to my PIM (Personal Information Manager) data — Importance and Urgency that is. Planner then automatically computes the Rank for the task. The magic does not stop there. Planner also assigns a Priority based on the former computed Rank.

Wow! You do not understand anything what I just said? No problem, do not worry. All you need to know is that Planner sorts groups of tasks based on their Rank and puts tasks I am going to pick next on top. Yes, like with a soup plates, I take the one on top, complete it, pick the next one from the top of the batch and so on until I die some time ;-]

Again, if you are waiting for me to do something and you see that thing on top of a group, you are lucky. If, on the other hand, you find your thing at the bottom of the group you might need a lot of patience...

Priority

There is one task per line. From left to right, any tasks starts with one out of three letters: A, B or C. Those letters determine three classes of priority (marked with underhats below) i.e. we are talking about the the ABC Method:

• A the highest priority. Any task with priority A will be picked up by me before tasks marked B or even C.
• B second highest priority. Only if there are no tasks with priority A within the same group will I start work on tasks with priority B. However, tasks with priority B have higher priority than those given priority C.
• C the lowest priority. Only if there is no task with priority A or even C around will I start picking up tasks with priority C.

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
   ^^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
   ^^

The coloring (images above) is for good looking only i.e. A could have any color and so for B and C as well.

Rank

If we take a look at one of the images on this page, showing a task, we can see something like this {{Rank: 5.46 - I=6 U=4}} with every task. From left to right there is

• The Rank, a floating point number (5.46 in this case).
• The Importance, another (floating point) number (6 in this case).
• The Urgency, yet another (floating point) number (4).

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
                                                                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
                                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

When we think about a task, there are two aspects in consideration: Urgency and Importance. We may want to do the most urgent things first, like answering an email, or we may want to do the most important things first, like reading this page. Or much better, balance Urgency and Importance and decide what to do.

Urgency and Importance are both measured by scores from 0-9. The higher the score, the more we want to do it first. 9 stands for I should have already done this by now and 0 stands for I can forget this.

As I already mentioned above, there are dependencies amongst all of them i.e. the Rank is computed from Urgency and Importance. Importance and Urgency are assigned based on the Eisenhower Method whenever I add a new task to my PIM data.

Deadline

As we can see from the images above, there might be something like this {{Deadline: 2007.11.20 - 16 days}} going with some task. This is a deadline (marked with underhats below) which means the task should be done until 2007.11.20 which is 16 days from today in the future respectively I still have 16 days left until I reach the deadline for this particular task. However, deadlines are optional and I just use them if there really is a deadline I need to take care of.

#B _ WP: Integrate new LastFm playlist webwidget. : ws#what_i_do {{Tasks:36}} {{Deadline: 2007.11.20 - 16 days}} {{Rank: 5.46 - I=6 U=4}} (lof.5 resource.software)
                                                                                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Let us recap. I said before, that the Rank is used to determine the Priority and the Rank itself is computed from Importance and Urgency. Now, with the deadline around, this is just another part to the equation — the Deadline is used to re-compute the Urgency as a deadline comes closer and closer i.e. means the whole chain (deadline --> urgency/importance --> rank --> priority) of computing things up to the Priority is done on a regular in order to ensure tasks are always sorted.

Again, the Urgency score is automatically calculated from how many days are left to meet the deadline. By default, it will score 9 if the task is overdue and 0 if the deadline is years away.

Status

That is probably the most interesting thing for folks interested in my schedule. Every task has a particular status (marked with underhats below) at a time which determines... well, guess what? Yeah, the task status determines the tasks current status which can be one out of

• _ open
• o in progress
• P pending
• D delegated
• X done
• C cancelled

The status symbol has the same coloring as the Priority but as with Priority, the color is just for reasons of good looking.

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
      ^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
      ^

The status symbols come right after the Priority on every task line e.g. #B _ PLANNER: Use planner-rss.el for... As we can see, first comes the Priority #B then, after a blank comes the status _ (open in this case). Following the status comes the next blank and following the blank the tag i.e. PLANNER: in this case.

There is another blank after the tag which is then followed by the task description Use planner-rss.el for....

Tags

Every task added to my yet existing PIM (Personal Information Manager) data gets tagged i.e. every task gets one, and only one, tag (marked with underhats below) assigned to it. About the motivation/reason for tagging can be read here in more detail.

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
        ^^^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
        ^^^^^^^

I do have a bunch of tags (WP:, GNUS:, PLANNER:, DEBIAN:, EMACS:, MUSE: etc.) — every tag can be assigned to one or more task(s) across plan and day pages.

Description

Task descriptions (marked with underhats below) probably are the most important part of a taskline next to links. A description tells about the task and is a few words long. From left to right, the description comes after the tag but before the annotation respectively before the global task ID (Identifier) (e.g. {{Tasks:20}}) since annotations are optional. The line below shows it in line 1 with some annotation (: ws#my_schedule) and then without in line 2.

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

The alerted reader might have noticed, that in the first example the global task ID comes after the rank. By default, the global task ID goes after the rank but in case I change the rank of an already existing task, the global task ID and the rank get swapped as we can see in line 2.

Annotations respectively Links

For the reader of my schedule, annotations appear just like any other links on this website. Links are pointers to places on this website or they may point to places outside this website e.g. to Wikipedia, a well known place on the net.

Links on my website are pink and turn into grey once used. The Wikipedia link above is an example for links starting at text. However, links can start at a lot of things next to text e.g. images. If you click on certain images on this website, its big brother shows up i.e. the same image but a bigger version of it.

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
                                                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^                                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
                                                                                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

So, there is a pointer, pointing from some text/image/etc. to something else i.e. another page on this website, another text possition on the same page, another but smaller/bigger version of the same image, some audio/video content or a link may point to something outside this website as we already know. So, now that we know about links, what exactly are annotations?

Annotations end up being links. It is the way how I create those links that names them annotations. Depending on where I am respectively what I currently do on my computer e.g. surfing the web, reading some email, editing some file contents etc. when I create a new task this information is included with the task.

In other words, if I read your email where you told me something that I find important, I take a note. Planner is then smart enough to put a link to your email into the task automatically as I create the note respectively task. Later on, one just has to click the link and ends up directly in your email I was reading while I took the note.

At this point, ordinary people² start searching for this email... with annotations every primordial source is just a few keystrokes/mouse clicks away since the annotation has become a link, pointing directly to the primordial source that lead to the creation of the note respectively task.

The example with the email is the same for files I edit, chat conversations I once had, websites I surfed, my contacts, etc. More information about annotations can be found here.

Global Task ID (Identifier)

Every task gets a unique number assigned (marked with underhats below) at the time of his creation e.g. {{Tasks:124}}. This number does not change over time and even when a task gets deleted, the ID he had is not ever used again.

1  #B _ WP: Do something about the bad CSS with the schedule part. : ws#my_schedule {{Rank: 4.48 - I=5 U=3}} {{Tasks:43}} (lof.2 resource.software)
                                                                                                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^
2  #B _ DEBIAN: Use the stuff within debian-el. {{Tasks:20}} {{Rank: 5.00 - I=5 U=5}} (lof.4 resource.software)
                                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^

The reason why this is a good thing, is that any task can be uniquely identified by his ID. One might think of a restaurant — just tell the waitress the unique number of your dish and you certainly get what you wanted instead of what the fuck... I did not order the 5 persons super plate.

Into that, if it ever happens folks talk about tasks they should use the task ID to refer to tasks instead of trying to describe the task based on the task description and finally getting things wrong and end up wasting time and confusing each other — just communicate the global task ID...

Weblog Part

WRITEME

Agenda

I have certain goals in life. I do what I do based on the goals ahead i.e. all my tasks focus on making progress towards achieving those goals.

Some of those tasks are related to my IT (Information Technology) work and a subset of it is about FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) and so, this is where the notes below come from. They describe a long-term agenda/roadmap for this website/platform.

The current big task is at the top with time going from top to bottom in a linear manner. Each big task is of course broken down in many little tasks (see levels of focus) which can then be found at one of my plan pages e.g. level of focus #6.

Into that, whenever a WRITEME tag is seen somewhere on this website/platform then one can assume that it will be written at some point in the future — probably because it is interconnected to some subject further down on the agenda and thus is left out until I/we made it there.

Chronological Order

Below are rough outlines of a roadmap with regards to this website/platform and my work with regards to technical matters:

This Website/Platform

• Python: the application/logic tier
  • Django
• MongoDB: the data tier
• Appearance: the presentation tier
• OpenVZ
  • security
    • firewall and port knocking
    • bastille (works only for stable)
    • ossec (not available as .deb as of now, June 2010)
    • harden, maybe install harden-servers and harden-environment within OpenVZ VEs
  • add info about how to add device nodes, NICs, NFS, remote dirs, etc. into a VE; see /home/sa/misc/manuals/software/openvz.pdf
  • finish WRITEME parts:
    • Resource Management
    • Checkpointing and Live Migration
    • Kernel Modules
• LXC (Linux Containers), OS Virtualization
• Instant Messaging / Multi User Chat
• Mail System: Postfix, Mailman, bogofilter, etc.
  • Gnus
• Tech Monitoring: not to be confused with Business Monitoring
  • Nagios (nagios FF plug-in)
• Datacenter: Hosting/Hardware e.g. DNS, handles, etc.
• Unison: depends in parts on finishing SSH, LVM, OpenVZ

Technology

This is still to be written. However, until I got the time to do it I provide enough information below to get going and build something akin to this platform.

• The whole layout is made up with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which you can get with any web browser while visiting my website/platform. I have the Web Developer add-on installed with Iceweasel also known as Firefox which makes grabbing the CSS of any website a piece of cake.

  

• GNU Emacs is my Editor; as the numerous images across the website show it, I use GNU Emacs to edit and manage the whole website/platform.
• I exclusively use FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software).
  • The whole platform is driven by DebianGNU/Linux on my own hardware located in some DC (Data Center).
  • The wiki part is driven by Muse.
  • The weblog part is also driven by Muse; muse-journal.el to be more precise.
  • The schedule part is driven by Planner which runs atop of Muse.
• All configuration to the three parts of this website/platform can be found in my .emacs.
• For drawing mind maps one might use vym for example.

I have two versions of the website. A local one and a remote on the hardware in the DC (Data Center). I synchronize my local copy of the platform with the remote on in real-time respectively whenever I have net connectivity i.e. I work on my local copy and push changes to the remote box located in the DC (Data Center).²

All that works great since the whole solution is pretty lightweight and resource sparing with resources like HDD (Hard Disk Drive) space, needed computing power to server the XHTML, RSS etc. to the net.

Folks looking for help might please stick to common official channels like the IRC channel for muse #[email protected] or the mailing list for muse — see Muse link above. I simply do not have the time to provide individual help except for those occasions when I hang out on #muse as well or answer questions on the Planner and/or Muse ML (Mailing List). In fact, I strongly recommend to use the mailing lists ...