Foswiki as PIM

Asking the question: How can Foswiki assist in personal information management?

Knowing the answer: Oh, so many ways.

a few conceptual features

• text
• tables
• calc
• macros

text

Foswiki is a wiki. All of your personal data can be entered as text. No externally fancy structures or schemas figure into the equation, there are some internal fancies, but it's still textual in nature. Let the wiki engine do it's thing and you get revision tracking of all changes.

text is a good format. Make a mistake? Go fix it. Did the application crash because you made a mistake in a number on one of your TML tables? No, it's just text. Very smart and plastic text.

tables

Foswiki's TML includes syntax and macros that morph these handy tables into mini database, spreadsheet, power houses.

For example; a quick time sheet / invoice table. Enter a line with date, hours, comments inside table bars and have the spreadsheet engine calculate totals.

Example

Date	Hours	Details
09 Oct 2009	0.5	This page
10 Oct 2009	2.5	more page
Total:	3 Hours at $25.50	for $76.5

Source

<!--
   * Set WAGE=25.50
-->
%TABLE{tablewidth="100%"}%
| *Date* | *Hours* | *Details* |
| 09 Oct 2009 |  0.5 | This page |
| 10 Oct 2009 |  2.5 | more page |
| Total: |  %CALC{"$SUM($ABOVE())"}% Hours at $%WAGE% |  for $CALC{"$EVAL(%WAGE% * $T(R$ROW():C2))"}% |

So now, to add a time entry, just open the PIM page, add a line or two, and forget about it until invoice time. After an invoice is cut, copy'n'cut'n'paste it into an archive page, keeping the table header and footer lines in the PIM page.

If you'd like more "group" in your PIM, then hiding and protecting the WAGE setting is not an overly difficult thing to do in Foswiki.

A little more effort and the invoice can be drawn up in is as nice a layout as %BEGINLATEX% can provide. Nice.

calc

%CALC% is your friend. It exposes spreadsheet functionality from Foswiki tables. See tables source.

macros

The Topic Markup Language macro expansion allows for the miracle that is an active page of Foswiki text. Expanded (in a nicely but not overly sophisticated algorithm) the $percent macros make Foswiki capable of performing as an efficient PIM. The option that you rarely have to repeat your critical bits of information is one powerful benefit as well. See tables source.

uses

Aside from being able to randomly throw text to a page, knowing full well that it is revision controlled, and can be structured as needed when needed makes for a fairly worry free PIM experience.

dates

Keep dates and use %CALENDAR% for a very nice at a glance view. Foswiki is pregnant with date smarts. Human readable dates and semantic calendar meaning to the underlying code. Easy and powerful.

reminders

%ACTION% entries make for an excellent personal tickler system. An %ACTIONSEARCH% block offering a pleasant reminder of things you promised yourself you would do.

pictures

go ahead; attach images.

charts and graphs

ok, leaning toward nerdy PIM now ... anyone into charts and graphs will definitely like the %CHART% macro. Not to mention the plethora of other image generating Foswiki assistants. Web maps, flow charts, timelines, and on and on.

contacts

Foswiki search leaves no rock unturned. Wrote down a snippet of info about someone, somewhen long ago? Search. Want quick access to numbers? A form and a table and Bob's your uncle.

privacy

Control is there; but I run my PIM like it is mine. The Foswiki is running on my desktop GNU/Linux, Apache, Perl setup, under my credentials. The files I want to lock down, I lock down. And to be honest, I only keep one file locked down. It's my key file for all the other files file. REBOL encloaked and I haul it around wherever it needs to go. Where I am and it is, is always the master copy. I find it easy to manage the critical bits that way.

anything

Foswiki can keep pretty much any personal information in a raw, a smart, random or structured form. A combination of forms that will satisfy beginners, intermediates (the most of us) and experts alike.

-- BrianTiffin - 07 Nov 2009

The SWOT sandbox test

SWOT	Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
Strengths Cool Management Friendly Data Management Motivated developer community The fork was undertaken with gusto	Weaknesses Function before Form may hurt first impressions Emotional developer community The fork has public relations issues Will the developer motivation continue?
Opportunities Spirit of Open Developer community may see this a a good thing Growing awareness	Threats Google Google is developing web applications that overlap with Foswiki: Google Wave everything is build around the concept of a Conversation real time updates, inline comments, playback, private messages copy to new conversation drag and drop images instant publishing to blog (or other Google app) (embedding in web pages), live updates (for instance image captions) wave app on mobile Android, iPhone collaborate documents: see changes, playback what's more: Wave can be privately hosted Presentation: http://wave.google.com/ Google Docs Google adds scripting capabilities to Google Docs (for example Excel like functions; language is OO javascript)

-- BrianTiffin - 17 Oct 2009