Piggydb Documents updated

Description of Spacial Tags has been added to Piggydb Documents.

Piggydb is (intended to be) designed in such a way that it can be used without reading a manual. But since it is still an immature project, there are some features you may not know without instruction. Spacial Tags would be one of these features.

Spacial Tags – http://piggydb.jp/en/fragment.htm?id=52

Piggydb@Facebook

I have created a Facebook page for Piggydb.

Because I’m not an active user of Facebook, I don’t quite understand how it works yet. I just aggregated Piggydb-related feeds (including this blog) on the page. If you are a Facebook user, it would be helpful to follow almost all the activities of Piggydb.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Piggydb/128024087272905

Piggydb V4.21 released

This release changes the fragment interface so that the content toggle is disabled when the content to display doesn’t exist.

In older versions, a fragment node box always has a content toggle button (▽) even when the fragment has no content. But clicking the button shows additional information: update-info and fragment-parents as blow:

In this version, the toggle button is hidden when the content is empty, and the additional information that was placed in the fragment body was moved to the fragment header as below:

This change saves you from unnecessary clicks and allows you to traverse your fragment network more smoothly.

Download Piggydb V4.21 at http://piggydb.net/

Piggydb V4.20 released

It’s been almost a half year since V4.19 was released last year. I’m back to the project and struggling to regain rhythm. This release is one of those steps.

This release fixes the memory leak bug caused by the database engine (H2 Database Engine).

http://groups.google.com/group/h2-database/browse_thread/thread/e1d39b41fcf15760

Just after this release, the source code repository was migrated from SourceForge.net to GitHub so you can tweak the code and feed it back more easily.

https://github.com/marubinotto/Piggydb

Download Piggydb V4.20 at http://piggydb.net/

Modifying the Look and Feel of Piggydb

Piggydb user Jerome J. Slote kindly shared his tips for modifying the existing look and feel of Piggydb, and moreover, an interesting way of extending the text formatting beyond the wiki markup set.

You may recall that I was looking for ways to insert invisible metadata into fragments: in particular, dates and tags that carry over from other systems when importing.

It turns out Piggydb has a “backdoor” capability that advanced users might find quite useful: text formatting in fragments, beyond the wiki markup set. This includes font changes, colors and highlighting, as well as the format I was seeking, invisibility.

The key is in the Stylish extension to Firefox, which superimposes style sheet specs that can be edited and toggled within the browser. I’d been using Stylish previously to customize Piggydb’s overall look and feel: serif font, eye-saving green background, a larger edit box, a smaller H1 display font in document view, and, most relevant to broader text formatting, the removal of internal tag highlighting in document view.

Style sheets, as you know, can alter the formatting of linking text according to the link’s target. So extended formatting can be accomplished by using dummy links whose format specs have been set up in the Stylish system.

Appended below is my Stylish sheet for Piggydb. You’ll notice a date format “dt”, a highlighting format “s1″, and an invisibility format “s0″. Within a fragment, any text that links to #dt, #s1 and #s0 is displayed in these formats if the style is toggled on. The hash mark makes for a more graceful response to an inadvertent click. Of course, these formatting links can be searched, so it’s easy to locate fragments with highlighted text, for example.

Piggydb’s integration with the browser and its extensions is a core advantage over standalone systems. Thanks for your vision, and for all you’ve done to make it real.

I think it is an amazing idea to add new formatting using a “href” attribute of a link. You can even add invisible metadata, which can be used for searching, to fragments.

The Stylish extension to Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/ja/firefox/addon/stylish/

The Stylish extension is really cool and I think it’s also very useful for web designers and developers to test their styles.

And the following is the Jerome’s Stylish sheet for Piggydb:

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://localhost:8080/") {
  * {
    background-color: #9fa583 !important;
    font-family:"georgia" !important;
  }
  a:link {
    color: black  ! important;
    border: transparent !important;
  }
  a[href$='s1'] {
    text-decoration: none !important;
    background-color:#CDBE70 !important;
  }
  a[href$='s0'] {
    display: none !important;
  }
  a[href$='dt'] {
    text-decoration: none !important;
    font-weight:bold;
    font-style:italic;
    font-size:small;
  }
  a[href$='tag.htm?id=777'] {
    background-color:orange !important;
    border: red !important;
    font-variant:small-caps!important;
    color: #777 !important;
  }
  body, span,  div, td,  h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, li {
   background-color:#9fa583 !important;
   color: #011
  }
  * textarea {
    background-color : #9a9a9a!important;
    width: 4.5in !important;
    height: 3.2in !important;
  }
}
@-moz-document url-prefix("http://localhost:8080/document-view.htm") {
  * {
    background:#9fa583 !important;
  }
  body, span,  div, td,  h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, li {
   background-color:#9fa583  !important;
   color: #011
  }
  H1 {font-size:medium!important;}
  H2 {font-size:small!important;}
}

The image below is how the page looks like with the additional style sheet:

Piggydb V4.19 released

This release upgrades the database engine (H2 Database Engine) to the latest stable version (1.2.147), which supports a more robust database file format.

Although the new format is not compatible with the older versions of Piggydb, this version supports automatic file conversion: the old database files will be converted into the new format automatically during startup.

H2 Database Engine: http://www.h2database.com

Download Piggydb V4.19 at http://piggydb.net/

Piggydb V4.18 released

This release adds a ‘New Relationship’ icon (+→) to the fragment toolbar. Dragging this icon from one fragment and dropping it onto another creates a new relationship between the two fragments.

You can create a relationship easily using drag-and-drop as follows:

There is a New Relationship icon (+→) on the fragment toolbar.

Drag this icon,

and drop it onto another fragment.

A new relationship will be created as shown:

Dropping the icon onto the “Selected Fragments” box creates a new relationship with many fragments in one operation.

Download Piggydb V4.18 at http://piggydb.net/

Piggydb V4.17 released

This release extends the sidebar with two new sidebar widgets: “Tag Palette” and “Filter“.

The Tag Palette in the sidebar has the same features as the existing pull-down Tag Palette on the main menu bar, also supporting drag-and-drop tagging.

As a result of this addition, the sidebar now has all the basic quick accesses to fragments: “Bookmark”, “Filter”, “Tag Palette” and “Recently Viewed”.

Because of the increased number of sidebar widgets, a show/hide toggle button has been added to each widget to allow users to fold (“hide”) unnecessary widgets.

Download Piggydb V4.17 from http://piggydb.net/

Piggydb V4.16 released

This release adds a master content toggle button to the fragment page (fragment.htm), the button allows users to open/close sub-fragment content toggles collectively.

This release fixes the bug where when dragging a fragment in “reorder” mode other fragments would act, incorrectly, as drop targets.

Download Piggydb V4.16 from http://piggydb.net/