Though my blog has been quiet for several days, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on online projects. Since I launched it over a week ago, http://www.dotnetinfluencers.org/ has taken a lot of my time, but it is coming along better than I had hoped for! If you not familiar with what I’m doing over at dotnetinfluencers.org, basically it is a Wiki, but with a twist. Instead of a normal wiki where everyone is encouraged just to write stuff, I’m encouraging people to help me define an XML schema about people, activities, events, and so forth related to .NET programming.

The idea is instead of a lot of writing define a list of properties for each item and then programatically we can generate lists based on those properties. I’m using FlexWiki and it has a language called WikiTalk which we’ll use to process the properties and provide the lists. Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is most of the actual text at this moment for a Wiki page about MSDN Magazine (the properties are the list of the colons, the values on the right; to understand the rest you’ll need to learn about WikiFormatting):

:Summary: About MSDN Magazine
TopicType: DotNetPeriodical
PeriodicalPublisher: [CMP]
PeriodicalName: MSDN Magazine
PeriodicalShortName: [MSDN]
PeriodicalEditor: ???
PeriodicalFormerEditors: JoshuaTrupin
PeriodicalLanguage: [English]
PeriodicalFirstPublished: 2000Mar
PeriodicalFormerNames: MicrosoftSystemsJournal, MicrosoftInteractiveDeveloper
PeriodicalUrl: http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/
PeriodicalStatus: [Active]

From the above and numerous other wiki "topics", we can generate an automatic list of periodicals on dotNetInfluencers.org:, and/or many other lists. Now don’t those page properties look suspiciously like attributes or subelements of an XML element? I thought you’d think so… If you haven’t seen dotNetInfluencers.org, check it out. Browse around to get a feel for the site, and then add yourself and/or anything related to .NET. Better yet, if you’d like to help me build this site to the point we can define and public the XML Schema which is the purpose and goal of the site, send an email to mikes (at) xtras.net.

UPDATE: This project is no more and my email address has changed.

communityprojects, dotnet, dotnetinfluencers, flexwiki, wikis, xml

On Monday July 5th, 2004 I blogged about a project on which I was working. That project was a Wiki based on FlexWiki located at www.dotNetInfluencers.org, and it is now live and public on the Internet.

Click Purpose and Goals to read what I’m attempting to accomplish with dotNetInfluencers.org.  If you are cynical and believe I might have a hidden agenda (as some of my friends told me people might question why I launched the site), please read this.

As it is wiki, it is designed to be a community project. I am the catalyst for launching it, and I wrote some ground rules for participation, but if it is to succeed it will be because the community drives it, and it is succeeds, it will be the community that benefits.

If you think this is a worthwhile project please blog about it and/or suggest to three .NET Influencers you know they add to their resume on the site (and it doesn’t have to be complete; they can just start listing their activities and recognitions with a note that it will be completed later.) For example, here is the list of people I’ve added already but for which most I don’t have an influencer resume.

Anyone with a blog about .NET, please list it.

Also, I encourage not just the .NET Influencers themselves but also Magazine publishers, Book publishers, Conference promoters, Training companies, and other organizations whose business involves .NET Influencers to post their list of books and authors, magazine articles and authors, conferences and sessions, training courses and trainers, and more. This is a site whose purpose is to collect and collate information about the community, and it won’t succeed unless the community contributes.

Thanks in advance for your help to make dotNetInfluencers.org a success.

dotnetinfluencers, flexwiki, people, projects, wikis