i should be working (but i'm fixing my computer).

I was looking at the Wine website to see whether there were any improvements that would make Wine natively useful (as opposed to running my virtualbox windows install), but apparently not. In any event, they have a link to the Xinha java html editor. Now, I had read a few mentions of it before and it was on my "getaroundto" list, but I guess I was otherwise bored this a.m. so I installed it.

...

I've been running phprojekt for a while to track my contacts, billing and the like. I've customized it somewhat for my own use. There are a number of groupware programs that I have tested momentarily and this is the one I have stuck with for awhile. But, there is a learning curve mountain with each of these, so I may have overlooked one I would like better. There is also a data-conversion curve, so once you have a lot of stuff set up to work in one groupware, changing your mind can be a daunting task. Or even worse, trying to run parallel systems for comparison purposes.

But, I have to admit the phprojekt code is a bit slow and the skin(s) a bit basic. Little by little I replace the original code with faster hacks -- which would not be much use to the phprojekt community because I don't understand some of the basic coding, so I don't maintain the user/security scheme correctly. But, I do end up with a faster tool that for my purposes is more flexible than the distro package.

Having said all that, you may be wondering what all this has to do with Xinha -- and therefore if you are reading this, you are once again bogged down in my rambling. But, if you happen to read my earlier "web 3.0?" post, you know that one of my interests is to get as much of my data/work/etc. into web-based tools so that switching computers is as easy as having access to a web browser.

So, a pretty important tool would be a decent editor. I mean, OpenOffice and other open source projects are pretty awesome and all that, but they have to be installed on each computer. It would be nice to have the OpenOffice package that merely opens in any web browser if I simply point it to my website. Or even to my server at home. (And no, I don't want to use Google's stuff, because I don't want all my data stored on Google servers).

In fact, I would give up a lot of features to have a good basic editor with a browser interface. And, if it could be integrated with MySQL, etc., so much the better.

Well, I have exactly 1.5 hrs. of experience with Xinha -- and most of that was troubleshooting my moronic typographical errors which prevented my "install" from running. When I finally got it to work, (and btw, it's a lot easier to hack the example files -- which are already functional upon install -- than to write your own page from scratch per the NewbieGuide, especially if you make a stupid but hard-to-notice typo), I liked what I saw, with one exception. After writing a nice html page, how do I save it?

It seemed to me the "obvious" solution was to save the text area to a php data file, so I did a search for that tool -- and came across the Firefox addon "Xinha here!".

Now, the main Xinha package has to run from a web server. Which could be your local apache server if you set one up, I suppose -- though I just put everything up on my website. But "Xinha here!" runs locally -- and it will load and "save here" documents (which means it probably will work as an html editor out of the box). The only oddity -- and this may be some failure on my part to notice the correct button or link -- is that to invoke it, you need a text box on the screen somewhere.

In fact, the Xinha project seems to me like a set of tools you could incorporate into your own project. Whereas, Xinha here! is ready to run out of the box. (Well, no box, but you know what I mean.)

The reason is, you can use Xinha here! for input to any text box on any webpage, say, for a forum post that allows html or the like.

But, you can also open saved files and open a "save as" dialog to save whatever it is you have put in your textarea into a discrete file.

Very slick. (In fact, I wonder why I am not trying Xinha here! out on this post. Didn't think of it ...)

It would also have the advantage of allowing php database posts -- such as this one and the one in my Executive Technical Manual (that is, wiki) to be saved to a file very easily. Which would be a good thing because I have a lot of entries and it would be somewhat catastrophic to lose them en masse (though I do back up the database, fortunately). But, after crashing isbw 1.0, I have been thinking a set of static html pages would be handy.

Thank you for visiting and have a pleasant tomorrow.

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Probably somewhere out there the term "web 3.0" actually means something and I suppose if I were not lazy I would do a search to see what others mean by it. Web 2.0 is the social networking thing, as far as I know -- but my social networking is mostly with webbots, so I'm not really up on the terminology. But anyway, I decided to rename this thread that I previously called "way forward" to web 3.0?, and in any event, what I'm referencing is the move to web based tools.