Workflows: Impact of style changes.

[Oisin Feeley]

Hi all,

Dale suggested in another thread that it would be interesting to discuss
our work-flows. 

The topic which prompted this was our new practice of trying to adhere
to the use of the User:fasname convention to refer to named participants
in conversations. Previously we have just used WikiNames, which for the
most part are modeled FirstnameLastname. The only way to find these
User:fasnames is to search the wiki. The WikiNames are easy to guess
most of the time and require less searching.

I asked in our recent IRC meeting about workflows and was told that most
people just edit the wiki directly. More power to you!  I think I would
go nuts trying to do that.  I have been using the following chain of
tools.

Writing my Beat:
1. LyX -> 2. ASCII export -> 3. Vim -> 4. Firefox with "It's All Text"
extension to edit wiki.

Preparing mailshot:
1. Firefox -> 2. Vim

LyX:  It's main advantage for me was that I could move paragraphs and
sentences around and references would automatically be re-numbered. A
disadvantage was some weird treatment of some diphthongs during export
to ASCII. Something I "kept meaning to fix".

Vim: I have a bunch of macros set up to do things such as: convert
CamelCase to [[CamelCase|Camel Case]] and other handy wiki markup. It's
also great for the mailshot for reformatting the cut and paste from the
wiki page as it allows me to change the indentations in blocks easily.
Change how the headings are formatted and some other stuff.

It's All Text: Suggested to me aeons ago by Karsten Wade. It allows you
to define an editor of your choice (in my case Vim) to be opened to edit
any text area on a webpage. The editor runs as normal except that when
you save/write it pipes the content back into the textarea of the
webpage saving you an irritating cut and paste.

As things stand now I have a nice dictionary of users and their camel
case names and Vim warns me with highlighting if there's a completely
new name. This saves me time in searching/checking names. If there's no
way to get a text file containing fasnames and first+lastnames from the
wiki then I'm condemned to searching for each one manually unless I
learn them!  As far as my current workflow goes this change is a
backward step. I'm going to see if I can automate something based on the
zodbot stuff that Dale mentioned. 

The references change means that using LyX is now no longer necessary. I
can just cut out that step and use Vim.  As far as I'm concerned that's
great. The only possible thing is that I need to figure out a way to
fold/hide the reference so that it's visually less intrusive inline and
I can concentrate on the flow of the text.

Anyway, that's probably more than anyone wanted to know.  But I heartily
recommend the "It's All Text" extension[1].

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4125

Best,
-- 
  Oisin Feeley
  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/OisinFeeley