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Make amusewiki famous

Open noraj opened this issue 6 years ago • 26 comments

Amusewiki and Text::Amuse are not famous.

There are nearly only two website talking about in on the internet amusewiki itself and cpan.

I found Text::Amuse because I love markdown but it's too light for writing documentation and Text::Amuse allow footnotes, natively support tables, Floating images and adjusting width, text alignment.

I wanted to write Text::Amuse so but it's not supported anywhere, not in GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, not in modern text editor like Atom or Brackets, no included in any distribution, package are only available for debian (and as unofficial repo), neithier the wiki or the markup language are listed on alternativeto.net, etc... This project is not dead as I see the last commit is 3 days ago.

The world need to :

  • Hear more about Amuse (wiki and markup)
    • contact blogger to talk about it
  • Amuse integration
    • support in tools, IDE, editors, website
  • Amuse tool
    • powerful amuse converter to html, pdf, epub (like muse-compile)
  • Amuse packages (wiki and markup compiler)
    • packages for other distro than debian (rpm (RedHat, SUSE), Archlinux, bsd, ...)

Amuse seems amazing and powerful but nobody know about it.

noraj avatar Nov 09 '17 18:11 noraj

Alexandre ZANNI [email protected] writes:

**Amusewiki ** and Text::Amuse are not famous.

Eh, I'm very well aware of this, and it has been an implicit issue for quite some time now. I'm personally bad at public relations so this issue has always been ignored/deferred. Help is welcome, though.

I wanted to write Text::Amuse so but it's not supported anywhere, not in GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, not in modern text editor like Atom or Brackets, no included in any distribution, package are only available for debian (and as unofficial repo), neithier the wiki or the markup language are listed on alternativeto.net, etc... This project is not dead as I see the last commit is 3 days ago.

No, the project is very well alive :-)

The world need to :

  • Hear more about Amuse (wiki and markup)
    • contact blogger to talk about it

This is the challenging part, I believe, and frankly don't know where to start. Again, help here is very much well accepted.

  • Amuse integration
    • support in tools, IDE, editors, website

On this regard something is moving. Thanks to @labdsf pandoc has now support (back and forward) for it. It would be great to have a JS porting of the parser (muse <=> HTML), so it could be plugged elsewhere, but I'm not optimist on this regard, though (as it looks like a lost battle against markdown).

  • Amuse tool
    • powerful amuse converter to html, pdf, epub (like muse-compile)

Well, that's the "official" maintained tool, which amusewiki itself uses, which is packaged as well (as amusewiki dependency).

  • Amuse packages (wiki and markup compiler)
    • packages for other distro than debian (rpm (RedHat, SUSE), Archlinux, bsd, ...)

This has also been on the todo list, and https://amusewiki.org/library/install has some preliminary work on this. Last time I looked at the RPM stuff, it needed a whole batch of perl modules to be packaged, so the task was daunting (even if it could be done). IIRC, with freebsd the situation was much better, though. I'm willing to put more efforts on the packaging if I know there is actually a request for it. I do think that packages are so much better than installing from github and forgetting about it.

https://amusewiki.org/library/slides-yapc-2016#toc14

Amuse seems amazing and powerful but nobody know about it.

Thanks for this :-)

-- Marco

melmothx avatar Nov 09 '17 19:11 melmothx

Oh and the first line of the README:

This is a wiki engine based on Emacs Muse markup with a Git backend.

seems very confusing. People will believe that Amusewiki use Emacs Muse markup but in reality is using Text::Amuse (which is based on it but different).

I suggest: This is a wiki engine based on Text::Amuse markup with a Git backend.. And then say that Text::Amuse is based on Emacs Muse on the Text::Amuse manual.

noraj avatar Nov 10 '17 08:11 noraj

@noraj1337 Good idea.

racke avatar Nov 10 '17 09:11 racke

I added AMuseWiki and Text::Amuse to alternativeto.net. They are currently waiting for validation by a staff reviewer.

noraj avatar Nov 10 '17 09:11 noraj

Alexandre ZANNI [email protected] writes:

Oh and the first line of the README:

This is a wiki engine based on Emacs Muse markup with a Git backend.

seems very confusing. People will believe that Amusewiki use Emacs Muse markup but in reality is using Text::Amuse (which is based on it but different).

I suggest: This is a wiki engine based on Text::Amuse markup with a Git backend.. And then say that Text::Amuse is based on Emacs Muse on the Text::Amuse manual.

Done, thanks. I believe the documentation in the tree should either converted to markdown/org/whatever works on github or better, moved to amusewiki.org leaving pointers on github.

-- Marco

melmothx avatar Nov 10 '17 13:11 melmothx

Alexandre ZANNI [email protected] writes:

I added AMuseWiki and Text::Amuse to alternativeto.net. They are currently waiting for validation by a staff reviewer.

Thanks a lot for this!

-- Marco

melmothx avatar Nov 10 '17 16:11 melmothx

Done, thanks. I believe the documentation in the tree should either converted to markdown/org/whatever works on github or better, moved to amusewiki.org leaving pointers on github.

I agree, this will be better to move the documentation (currently in the README) to amusewiki.org and replace the wiki with something like: name of the project + logo + short description + pointer(s) to amusewiki.org documentation.

PS : I replied by mail but I'm not seeing the reply posted here.

noraj avatar Nov 10 '17 16:11 noraj

I added AMuseWiki and Text::Amuse to alternativeto.net. They are currently waiting for validation by a staff reviewer.

Thanks a lot for this!

They may can be improved but here they are:

noraj avatar Nov 10 '17 16:11 noraj

Very good, thanks again!

melmothx avatar Nov 10 '17 19:11 melmothx

Just found Muse implementation in Java: https://github.com/abailly/muse-parser/

link2xt avatar Apr 02 '18 00:04 link2xt

@melmothx You might want to add some tags to this repository, like perl, wiki, blogging, cms, catalyst, publishing, epub, latex, opds, git.

link2xt avatar Dec 09 '18 04:12 link2xt

@link2xt Done, thanks

melmothx avatar Dec 09 '18 08:12 melmothx

On the same subject, found amusewiki listed here: https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/LeavingTheCloud maybe time for a RTP?

melmothx avatar Dec 11 '18 19:12 melmothx

I have started Vim support repository: https://github.com/link2xt/vim-muse I am not going to finish it anytime soon, but it is good enough at preventing Vim from detecting .muse files as conf filetype and highlighting footnotes. Does not even highlight emphasis yet.

Just for reference, Emacs support is at https://github.com/melmothx/text-amuse/blob/master/examples/text-amuse-mode.el

link2xt avatar Dec 15 '18 16:12 link2xt

@link2xt another really good initiative!

melmothx avatar Dec 15 '18 17:12 melmothx

The homepage lacks a prominent link to the markup manual, so it is hard of find. Also a "Getting started" section is great for beginners.

racke avatar Mar 31 '19 08:03 racke

@racke amended that (hopefully), also made it more concise and added install and manual to navbar links. Thanks for the suggestions.

melmothx avatar Mar 31 '19 09:03 melmothx

Related: https://github.com/melmothx/text-amuse/issues/55

link2xt avatar Oct 03 '19 11:10 link2xt

hi,

i recently discovered this project from the anarchist library running it. it's freaking awesome software. i thought this seemed an ok place to add some general/various comments, the first few pertain directly to the 'fame' of amusewiki. (not tech questions, i'm a poet/translator/publisher.)

  • i wonder if eg aaaaarg.fail and even gutenberg or any other online libraries would be keen to hear about it? it made me think i shd start an online library, it honestly made me think starting one was as simple as installing amuse and telling ppl the url.

  • it seems like the project could be very handy if it ran as an open web service, not just as a website/library engine. as in, you set up a site, anyone can visit, dump text, output a great pdf, without actually building a library of the books so created. cd it be set up in such a way?

  • related: is it possible to build an archive of texts that can only be accessed as pdfs, and that do not display openly in the browser (i fear the answer is no).

  • is there a list of known instances of amuse? (as there is for like etherpad-lite and other services)

  • i guess another question from the library side of things would be: it is poss to somehow hook it up with OCR? as in, scan book, extract text, then use amuse to make top notch book. (mayb this not a priority...)

  • doesn't amuse almost overtake the function of eg scribus?

  • i'm very very happy to see that there are and other similar tags, as such things are often overlooked by code focused projects. (actually does anyone know of other formats that respect spacing without making it verbatim/code? its often a prob for me, as i want to layout poetry, but i don't any formats well. eg kramdown doesn't have but mayb it has a diff name?).

  • finally, i was thinking of setting up an instance on a self-hosted server. its a simple debian headless setup. i held off when apt suggested i wd be installing almost 2gb of data. is it rly so large?! it made me hesitate. also is the service also happy running alongside a simple website (jekyll) with nginx as r proxy? it looks like the installer script wants to do a lot of stuff immediately, in which case i don't want to blow up my existing site by installing.

thx, m

ghost avatar Nov 07 '19 15:11 ghost

Hi!

mouseb [email protected] writes:

hi,

i recently discovered this project from the anarchist library running it. it's freaking awesome software. i thought this seemed an ok place to add some general/various comments, the first few pertain directly to the 'fame' of amusewiki. (not tech questions, i'm a poet/translator/publisher.)

Thanks a lot! It's always nice to hear something like that!

  • i wonder if eg aaaaarg.fail and even gutenberg or any other online libraries would be keen to hear about it? it made me think i shd start an online library, it honestly made me think starting one was as simple as installing amuse and telling ppl the url.

Probably they are not so much interested because they run their own software with its own scope etc.

  • it seems like the project could be very handy if it ran as an open web service, not just as a website/library engine. as in, you set up a site, anyone can visit, dump text, output a great pdf, without actually building a library of the books so created. cd it be set up in such a way?

https://sandbox.amusewiki.org does that. Anyone can add texts there (but there's no guarantee that they will stay there forever. But I guess this answers your question to some extent.

  • related: is it possible to build an archive of texts that can only be accessed as pdfs, and that do not display openly in the browser (i fear the answer is no).

Well, not sure what do you mean exactly, but for sure you could have a private instance on a virtual host and on another just serving the PDFs, but seems overcomplicated.

Instead, you could use the command line tools to compile the muse files to PDF, with your settings, and then host them somewhere. See

https://amusewiki.org/library/offline-tools

  • is there a list of known instances of amuse? (as there is for like etherpad-lite and other services)

There is no official list. The sites I know and/or host lack variety or are internal/private tools.

  • i guess another question from the library side of things would be: it is poss to somehow hook it up with OCR? as in, scan book, extract text, then use amuse to make top notch book. (mayb this not a priority...)

OCR is the step before an amusewiki upload. Well, in theory yes, an OCR scan could be plugged in, where now there is the HTML upload. That would provide only the first draft, though.

There could be hard performance penalties for doing that, but given enough power on the machine, it could be doable, yes, but not sure if worth the whole trouble.

  • doesn't amuse almost overtake the function of eg scribus?

Kind of. The engine behind amusewiki is LaTeX. With Scribus/Indesign/etc. you can output arbitrary pages, for bad or good, while LaTeX is very good with regular/templated output, while not giving you much room for fancy stuff.

  • i'm very very happy to see that there are and other similar tags, as such things are often overlooked by code focused projects. (actually does anyone know of other formats that respect spacing without making it verbatim/code? its often a prob for me, as i want to layout poetry, but i don't any formats well. eg kramdown doesn't have but mayb it has a diff name?).

I'm glad it meets your purposes. The Muse format is way more writer-friendly than Markdown, which is IMHO more coder-oriented. See https://amusewiki.org/library/rationale

I can't answer your question though.

  • finally, i was thinking of setting up an instance on a self-hosted server. its a simple debian headless setup. i held off when apt suggested i wd be installing almost 2gb of data. is it rly so large?! it made me hesitate. also is the service also happy running alongside a simple website (jekyll) with nginx as r proxy? it looks like the installer script wants to do a lot of stuff immediately, in which case i don't want to blow up my existing site by installing.

Well, it's not supposed to blown up anything and will only alter a nginx sites-enabled file with the new virtual host. You are even propted to review the configuration, so it's striving to be careful.

The 2gb of data is the (admittely oversized) installation of texlive from your distro. The idea was that it would be easier to download the full stuff than having troubles later with missing pieces. Stripping it down would for sure help to avoid scaring people away, so it's for sure a good point. On the other hand, having packages from distro is better security-wise, as you are going to receive updates.

-- Marco

melmothx avatar Nov 08 '19 08:11 melmothx

hi marco,

thx for your comments, my head was just exploding with ideas prompted by discovering yr project. i went ahead and installed, and it is up and running and didn't affect my existing projects on the same box.

i have some follow up questions but perhaps i'll have more of a play first and then open separate issues to better explain what i mean and to work out if amusewiki cd work for my imagined projects.

thx m

ghost avatar Nov 08 '19 11:11 ghost

  • it seems like the project could be very handy if it ran as an open web service, not just as a website/library engine. as in, you set up a site, anyone can visit, dump text, output a great pdf, without actually building a library of the books so created. cd it be set up in such a way?

https://sandbox.amusewiki.org does that. Anyone can add texts there (but there's no guarantee that they will stay there forever. But I guess this answers your question to some extent.

what i had in mind here was also sth that might help the project become more well-known. as in, having a dedicated instance set up that presents itself as a tex/pdf bookbuliding service rather merely than a demo of what the software can potentially do. its just about the way it is presented online i guess.

set up the way pastebin or upload sites are, or things like smallpdf...

i feel like it cd help lots of ppl who simply don't know (and aren't going to spend the time learning) latex stuff, because it appears to me that your software bridges the gap between it and ppl to use it without technical knowledge, potentially saving ppl (those who can't hire a designer etc) a lot of headaches. all they need to learn is a few easy muse tags.

it wd be just like yr sandbox instance but with a basic descriptor about what amusewiki/bookbuilder does and how you might use it. ie superficial changes to make it clear that ppl can use amusewiki to make great books in 2 minutes and geared toward the public rather than potential site maintainers.

mayb not a task for you personally, but just an idea.

i also wdnt be surprised if university libraries/gutenberg wdnt be interested in yr software even if they do have their own things running already, but mayb theyd discover if for themselves if it became a bit more known around the traps.

all best!

ps i submitted deets about amusewiki to itsfoss and awesome selfhosted.

ghost avatar Nov 08 '19 15:11 ghost

mouseb [email protected] writes:

it wd be just like yr sandbox instance but with a basic descriptor about what amusewiki/bookbuilder does and how you might use it. ie superficial changes to make it clear that ppl can use amusewiki to make great books in 2 minutes and geared toward the public rather than potential site maintainers. mayb not a task for you personally, but just an idea.

That's definitively an idea worth pursuing, just need the time to do it in the best way.

i submitted deets about amusewiki to itsfoss and awesome selfhosted.

Thanks!

-- Marco

melmothx avatar Nov 08 '19 16:11 melmothx

I had a shot at creating a wikipedia article for amusewiki and the editors gave be a big ❌ , saying that there are not enough notable articles talking about it.

My personal theory is it's just a cover story and that they're just afraid people will find out about the raw power and charisma of aumusewiki.

guest20 avatar May 05 '23 13:05 guest20

guest20 @.***> writes:

I had a shot at creating a wikipedia article for amusewiki and the editors gave be a big ❌ , saying that there are not enough notable articles talking about it.

Of course.

My personal theory is it's just a cover story and that they're just afraid people will find out about the raw power and charisma of aumusewiki.

That's a bit of an overstatement but I do appreciate the effort :-D

-- Marco

melmothx avatar May 05 '23 13:05 melmothx