A whole new web service ‘Oinker’ coming soon!

Hi there,

It’s been another break in developing Piggydb for almost a year. It was probably the longest but I believe the most important pause ever in this project.

I’ve been working on a new web service that shares many concepts with Piggydb, and finally, it’s about to enter the phase of inviting beta testers.

I’m going to start with invitations for Piggydb Supporters to join the first group of beta testers.

Stay tuned!

Another thoughtful comment on filters

Another thoughtful comment on filters from Igor:

I am tinkering a bit with Piggydb, as I am looking for a replacement for BasKet which stalled at KDE3, and my favorite Wiki on a Stick that is on its way to discontinuation of development for some years now (unfortunately, pretty common in one-man-developement FOSS). So far, Piggydb looks extremely promising. To get to know it, I wrote a little knowledge base of its user interface, parts of which are undocumented, and that made me read the documentation base thoroughly.

Concerning redundancy of filtering, I can only confirm it from the standpoint of purity of concept. However, Piggydb is just a tool, so the true concept is its projected usage. I see filters as saved searches, and when the base is growing huge, one needs every help in finding fragments. Using tags, that is, concepts for this purpose makes tags themselves impure, or rather misused. Besides, no matter how do we approach tagging, possibility of tagging overflow is luring all the time, the more so as one pays more attention to structuring one’s knowledge base. We learn about it from almost any science, particularly from humanities, as the extent of conceptual superstructure might seriously challenge any basic influx of data, and the literary criticism is a very good example.

So, the only thing I feel is wrong with filters is impossibility of filtering by keywords. In other words, I’d like to see the filtering tool as another search tool with additional naming and saving. This, of course, can be an option added to the main search tool.

As for the third, the left frame or column, in the beginning it seemed to me as wasting of precious page space, once there is this very fine quick preview available. But I very soon learned to appreciate the possibility of viewing simultaneously entire single fragment and the list of other ones. Particularly in the initial phase of looking for regularities it is good to have as few limitations as necessary. So I’d prefer not having the list (or the tree) in the central frame automatically filtered by the chosen fragment tags, because instead of sparing few clicks it is often forcing few extra. I am regularly comparing the fragment to various sets of other fragments, so I am doing some searching in the central frame, having the focused fragment exposed in the left one. Of course, when one already knows one’s base hierarchy and has it built, then present behavior is perfectly OK, but as I got it, Piggydb is about finding a structure rather than documenting it, and about relation network rather than hierarchical tree.

Actually, the only thing I believe Piggydb is missing at this moment is graphical, vectorial presentation of relations network on demand, with fragments represented by their names (possibly links) interconnected by arrowed lines, maybe some sort of SVG. It would make a huge help in examining (and possibly even editing?) already established relationships. But again, bearing in mind probable number of fragments of any serious base, I am fully aware this might be too much to ask for. Pity, because this one feature would make Piggydb a killer app.

Piggydb V6.18 – All/Any Switch for Tag Search and Related Fragments

This release adds yet another update to the search feature by adding an All/Any switch to the tag search:

In the previous versions, searching by tags results in the fragments tagged with ‘all’ of the specified tags. From this version, you can switch between ‘all’ and ‘any’. ‘Any’ displays the fragments tagged with ‘any’ of the specified tags.

The ‘Any’ tag search produces another feature called “related fragments”. In the fragment page, the list view displays all the fragments tagged with any of the tags of the focused fragment:

You can download the latest version from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/piggydb/files/latest/download

Get Supporters Edition at CeBIT!

We decided to give all of CeBIT talk attendees free copies of the Piggydb Supporters Edition which provides premium features in addition to the standard features.

We hope you’ll come to Piggydb’s talk in Hanover next week!

http://www.cebit.de/event/grow-your-knowledge-with-piggydb-/VOR/57737

Piggydb at CeBIT 2014 in Hanover

“Grow Your Knowledge with Piggydb” by Dmitri Popov
– 10 Mar. 2014, 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM
– http://www.cebit.de/event/grow-your-knowledge-with-piggydb-/VOR/57737

Don’t miss it if you will be at CeBIT! It’s a very rare opportunity to hear about Piggydb.

Piggydb V6.17 – Incremental Search by Tag and MathJax Support

Firstly, this release extends the fragment incremental search to support tags in addition to keywords. You can add tags for the list to include or exclude the fragments with the specified tags as follows:

The list will be automatically refreshed as you edit the criteria (keywords, tags). This incremental search is going to replace the filter feature which will be removed in coming versions.

Secondly, the release adds MathJax support that allows you to embed mathematics notation by writing LaTeX expressions in the content:

And lastly, the global search box has been cleaned up a little bit, removing the redundant buttons.

You can download the latest version from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/piggydb/files/latest/download

Piggydb Use Case: Relationships(Links) for Quick Reference

Piggydb user David Shrader kindly shared his experience of using Piggydb for his study. He utilizes piggydb’s relationships(links) to allow him to quickly access basic information to learn via Fragment Quick View.

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I was in class training to earn my Oracle OCA certification, and I was having a lot of trouble studying for the 1z0-151. I had my notes in a notebook, and I found that if I read over the “key facts” I was reading a lot more than necessary about certain elements, and not enough about others. I passed my test, but only by 4 points.

Fast forward to studying for my 1z0-152, and I knew that I had to do something different to learn the material. In addition to staying up many late nights studying, I also began using piggydb to take notes and link pieces of knowledge together. The most beneficial thing for me was being able to create links (example syntax [fragment:99 BASIC INFO]) to knowledge fragments, allowing me to hover over the links to glance at information I already knew, and if I realized I didn’t understand something well enough I was able to open the link and read over the entire concept in depth. This may not sound very helpful, but for my learning style it was perfect. I was able to include charts and tables in the fragments for each key term, and I wasn’t forced to have them in the same (illogical) order as the books. I displayed storage charts from the largest to smallest element, etc. Then I was able to link the knowledge fragments together when they were related, which also helped cement the information in my mind.

So what was the final outcome you might ask? I scored a 93 on the 1z0-152. My instructor was shocked. Just for the sake of comparison, I scored a 64 on the first exam. That’s a 29% improvement thanks to piggydb, lol.

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Thanks, David!

Piggydb V6.16 – Fragment Quick View

Piggydb has provided you with ways to easily navigate through a knowledge-fragment network, for example, the tree and list views. This release adds another alternative to these navigation features: Fragment Quick View.

It allows you to move through a network, fragment by fragment, more lightly.

Mouse hovering over a link to a fragment for a second brings up a pop-up view for the fragment:

In the pop-up view, you can move to another fragment via links (the parents, children or links in the fragment content):

You can download the latest version from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/piggydb/files/latest/download

Piggydb V6.15 – Tag Icons for Each Type of Tags

This release changes the tag icons to have different colors according to the types of tags:

System Tag (starting with ‘#’ and used for management purposes):

Plain Tag:

Tag Fragment:

This update would be important more than you think, because tag-fragments are the most important parts of Piggydb database and the new version allows you to easily recognize your tag-fragments from the others.

You can download the latest version from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/piggydb/files/latest/download

Piggydb V6.14 – Expand Sub-fragments After Reading Content

Have you ever encountered a situation that you had read a long fragment and subsequently wanted to read its sub-fragments, but it was quite frustrating to scroll back to the fragment header to click on the tree toggle button?

This version fixes this problem by adding a button at the bottom of the content:

Clicking on this button expands the sub-fragments like the tree toggle button does:

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This version also adds support for non-ascii file names when you upload files as file fragments.

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You can download the latest release of Piggydb from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/piggydb/files/latest/download