4 ms·

What happened on 1/1/17 to make you stop using it?

jacquesm 8y ago
We badly needed a multi-user capable tool so I hacked something that replicates the 2% of Leo's functionality that we need to get our work done. It's far from ideal but two years on there are a few tens of thousands of nodes in the system and it has already far outlived it's expected life-span (as always...). We really will do that rewrite one of these days though, especially with more than one job on the go at once the system will start to show its limitations. Even so, for a three day hack it has done remarkably well.
- jv22222 8y ago
  Please write a blog post about it! That would be a great read :)
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    It's a one page PHP app that any HN'er could probably throw together in a day or two, and it would likely look better and work better than what I built so there isn't much honor in there, I needed a solution, not something that would serve as the basis for a nice write-up.
    - lucideer 8y ago
      > two years on there are a few tens of thousands of nodes in the system and it has already far outlived it's expected life-span This sounds like something that would be more than interesting enough for me to want to read, quite apart from the quality or complexity or ingenuity of the code itself. A nice write up isn't necessarily one that was planned as such at inception.
      - jacquesm 8y ago
        It's a few hundred lines of very ugly PHP, at a minimum I would have to do some housecleaning before posting the code and there is no upside for me, it was - and is - throwaway code and I can't wait until we have a viable replacement so I can kill it. Side note: it uses a bunch of keyboard short-cuts to rearrange the tree by moving nodes around and JS absolutely sucks are reliably capturing ctrl-key combinations. Highly frustrating. Long story short (and without the code): The application presents a tree to the user, parts of which can be copied, each node in the tree is internally referenced by an ID which allows for multiple nodes having the same name attribute. Besides the name attribute there are tags, source (handy to keep track of where you found stuff), an answer to the question associated with that node, an advisory and a bunch of flags and priorities. The layout is three panes, a top one with some links for commonly used functions and a search bar, the left hand side gives the tree and the present location in the tree and the right hand side shows all the attributes of the current node. It features import and export in XML format of the whole tree or parts of it, the ability to attach pdfs and images to nodes (the images are shown inline in the parent node), to attach notes to nodes and to export to a different editor for report writing purposes (usually open office).
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        erikpukinskis 8y ago
        The web is amazing. That you can throw that together in a single small file of “throwaway” PHP and use it in production speaks to why the web has been such a successful platform.

We badly needed a multi-user capable tool so I hacked something that replicates the 2% of Leo's functionality that we need to get our work done. It's far from ideal but two years on there are a few tens of thousands of nodes in the system and it has already far outlived it's expected life-span (as always...). We really will do that rewrite one of these days though, especially with more than one job on the go at once the system will start to show its limitations. Even so, for a three day hack it has done remarkably well.

jv22222 8y ago
Please write a blog post about it! That would be a great read :)
- jacquesm 8y ago
  It's a one page PHP app that any HN'er could probably throw together in a day or two, and it would likely look better and work better than what I built so there isn't much honor in there, I needed a solution, not something that would serve as the basis for a nice write-up.
  - lucideer 8y ago
    > two years on there are a few tens of thousands of nodes in the system and it has already far outlived it's expected life-span This sounds like something that would be more than interesting enough for me to want to read, quite apart from the quality or complexity or ingenuity of the code itself. A nice write up isn't necessarily one that was planned as such at inception.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      It's a few hundred lines of very ugly PHP, at a minimum I would have to do some housecleaning before posting the code and there is no upside for me, it was - and is - throwaway code and I can't wait until we have a viable replacement so I can kill it. Side note: it uses a bunch of keyboard short-cuts to rearrange the tree by moving nodes around and JS absolutely sucks are reliably capturing ctrl-key combinations. Highly frustrating. Long story short (and without the code): The application presents a tree to the user, parts of which can be copied, each node in the tree is internally referenced by an ID which allows for multiple nodes having the same name attribute. Besides the name attribute there are tags, source (handy to keep track of where you found stuff), an answer to the question associated with that node, an advisory and a bunch of flags and priorities. The layout is three panes, a top one with some links for commonly used functions and a search bar, the left hand side gives the tree and the present location in the tree and the right hand side shows all the attributes of the current node. It features import and export in XML format of the whole tree or parts of it, the ability to attach pdfs and images to nodes (the images are shown inline in the parent node), to attach notes to nodes and to export to a different editor for report writing purposes (usually open office).
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - erikpukinskis 8y ago
        The web is amazing. That you can throw that together in a single small file of “throwaway” PHP and use it in production speaks to why the web has been such a successful platform.