Vote now to open up Metalink!

Richard Harding has proposed on Oracle Mix that Metalink should be opened up:

There is goldmine of useful information in Metalink and having access to it would optimize the efficiency of people using Oracle toolsets, in my opinion enhancing productivity and by inference Oracle adoption globally which would be win win for everyone.

I've expressed the same thoughts myself in the past. So all of you Oracle professionals who would benefit from access to Metalink but are not included in your employer's arrangements (especially for freelancers like me) - go and vote!

Latrz - for all those web pages you want to read, just not right now

James Strachan blogged about Latrz here. It's a neat little Google app that lets you bookmark and tag pages you want to read later, then come back and read them (and check them off your list) when you've got a spare few minutes. Coming soon, you'll also be able to share the stuff you liked with your friends / work colleagues.

TiddlyWiki

I thought I'd seen all the permutations of Wikis out there: written in php, stored as files; written in PL/SQL and stored in Oracle; and with a range of different markup conventions. And recently I've successfully used wiki style markup to better decorate output from Oracle Designer (of which more later in a separate post).

Today, in one of those serendipitious chances that comes from following a couple of irrelevant but intriguing blog links, I tripped over TiddlyWiki. Rather than giving you a server-side wiki, the whole thing is packaged on the client side. A TiddlyWiki is a single HTML file that contains its own code; which self-edits as you add content. You save the file locally (and can then publish to a website if you like).

As a tool written by web designers it just looks great. You don't just click and get another page; the expanded content (called a Tiddler) zooms out at you. You can choose to expand or collapse whichever tiddlers you like - at the same time. That may be a big advantage over more boring wiki implementations.

For large communities, it's probably all wrong - personal changes in effect fork the entire wiki; but it may be a very effective personal tool - kind of mind mapping on the cheap, but much prettier than editors like treepad (and instantly portable, no software install required - keep it on your USB stick).

Basic usage instructions can be found here - written as a TiddlyWiki so you can try it out. I'm going to see if I can turn a rather unexciting Designer entity report into a thing of beauty...