I have been trying to find a good way to build flashcards to be displayed on the iLiad. What I have done so far is just write them in a word processor and convert it to a pdf. It works ok, just that there is no good way to navigate your way through it except through the whole stack.

My question is does anyone know a better way to accomplish this? Is it possible to do something similar with a wiki interface?

Has anyone run a Wiki on an iLiad? I have seen that there are a number of different ones available, has anyone tried it yet or does it require some other software enabled (Java capable web type interface?)

I think that having a wiki on the iLiad would be a great function! Your own customizable encyclopedia/database of information. Do any of the very talented hackers out there have any ideas or insight?

Thanx All!

I agree that a wiki on the iLiad would be great-- I love using wikis to organize my info-- but wiki is a web application, so you'd need a web server for most versions. As far as I know, no one has ported Apache or any other web server to the iLiad yet. I'm not sure if Apache would be too resource-intensive. One of the many talented iLiad developers might be able to give an opinion.

There are two alternate variations: client side and P2P wikis. A client side wiki would manage the editing in the web client, but I don't know as any of the web clients on the iLiad have enough support for DHTML (including Javascript) to handle this. (And I think you'd still need a web server.) A P2P (peer-to-peer) wiki does exist, which doesn't require a web server at all, but it would need to be ported to the iLiad, and it's not open source. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_wiki for more info.

i think there are enough webservers out there that should run with small or no modifications on the iLiad. (one example http://www.lighttpd.net/, can be run with PHP FastCGI). Anyone care to throw the lighttpd source into the compiler chain? And for the wiki, I like DokuWiki, it does not require a datase, because it just uses a flat-file structure.
The only thing with PHP is, it will eat a good bunch of RAM.

Usemod Wiki might be another good choice, as it also uses flat files and no db, and has lots of mods, though it does require Perl, which again is going to eat RAM.

Maybe it was just a configuration problem, but I can tell you, on my OpenWrt router PHP with Lighttpd was lame as hell.
(well that thing only got 200 MHz and 32 MB RAM)
But I think it would be worth a try on the iLiad.

Have you tried tiddlywiki? http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
It's a really nice wiki app which runs in a single webpage, using javascript. No web server required! I haven't checked compatibility with the iLiad browser.

doesn't work. The "busy" led is blinking and the progress bar keeps updating.
BTW: would it be a bad idea to test binaries from the NSLU2 linux project? Since that thing is also powered by a ARM CPU, maybe they work.

Which one doesn't work?

Does tiddlywiki save its data locally? I don't know if there's a Javascript-capable browser for iLiad yet, is there?

i thought the original browser (minimo if i remember right) does java script.

push:
what about this idea, Lighttpd + PHP5 + SQLite + TikiWiki?
The good thing abou this is, that you can easily edit and show your contents on nearly every computer (for example on Windows you can use Abyss Webserver X1 + their preconfigured PHP5 package). This is because SQLite uses a approach similar to Access, so the whole database is in one file. So it's easy to copy.

I'm a huge fan of TikiWiki, and if it would run reasonably well on the iLiad, I might well buy one even at the current price. It would come quite close to qualifying as an "info pad (http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2006/05/desperately-seeking-info-pad.html) " at that point.

ok, i have just realized that TikiWiki would be a bit of overkill. We just want the Wiki function, not a blog and forums and so on. Or am I wrong?

I have done exhaustive searching through the web expending many hours on slow internet connections to find some solutions to this situation. What I have found to be the best possible solution is Stone Notes (http://www.stonenotes.com) I downloaded the demo and then after much consternation paid for the program. It so far seems to be the best alternative for organizing my data/information. I am hoping that I can get it adapted to some sort of flash card function.

The developer/author is working on HTML export, I am hoping that it will work on the iLiad. That might come close to approximating a wiki on the iLiad. The author of the program seems keen on taking input from his customers. After I bought the program I even got a personal email from him thanking me for my purchase.

So far, for the time being this program should hopefully fit the bill for organizing the information that I need to compile for my uses even if it doesn't initially work on the iLiad. It is WYSIWYG and that is one of the most important features for me.

There are a bunch of other programs out there that came close, but I lost interest with because of the need to input formatting manually. I am not the best typist in the world and learning to put formatting tags into whatever text I am entering is just too time consuming. Some of the programs that I checked out were; Zulupad, Wikidpad, StickWiki, TiddlyWiki, StoneNotes & ConnectedText, to mention a few. A couple other alternatives are Linux based and looked rather interesting. These were Tomboy, and Zim. Zim can be loaded into windows but is still pretty buggy in that environment. Out of what I saw the best programs were some of the simplest. Zulupad, Wikidpad, Zim, StickWiki, and some of what I saw of Tomboy. Since Zulupad, Wikidpad and StickWiki are not WYSIWYG that kind of eliminated them, though I will keep an eye on them as they might integrate features that are more useful to me/us in the future. I don't care for the TiddlyWiki interface, and since it appears that it builds the page in such a way that everything is in close proximity to each other that sort of negates the flashcard function. If you anyone has anymore insight on that I am willing to listen, but in spite of all that it is still not WYSIWYG.

The thing about a lot of these smaller specialized programs is that once they fit the bill for most of the developer's needs upgrades and further functionality usually stop being implemented and the program "stagnants" for the rest of us.

I would like to get into Linux more, but due to a number of programs that I am tied into I am still kind of mired into the Windoze world. Time getting it up and running on my devices is also a concern.

My interest in the wiki for the iLiad has nothing to with web integration or the ability for others to edit the file. It is just a excellent interface for holding and accessing information.

The iLiad to me at least seems to be right on the verge of being a breakthrough device. The advanced functionality that was at least built into the device was one of the reasons that I purchased it. I read the Infopad article, that sort of fits my bill though I would in the very least like to be able to play music. Additionally if it could run some small Palm type programs that would be real neat. The thing is that the iLiad could be treading the road of the Apple Newton and it will be the Sony Reader that trumps it.

Hi Firekat,

I don't know if you are a Firefox user, but if you are I *strongly* recommend the Scrapbook extension.
If you spend a lot of time on the web as I do, it is fantastic for saving local copies of web pages, snippets of web pages, images, bookmarks, etc. in a tree structured layout. You can also create and edit your own notes.

I use mine with NetDrive, a utility which makes an ftp site appear as a local drive in your computer. That way my scrapbook is saved to an ftp site and I can access it from various computers.

In time I will be looking at using this on my iLiad too.

I use Firefox & Opera. I will have to check it out the Scrapbook extension. I only use IE when I absolutely have to with difficult sites.

The NetDrive sounds interesting but I really stay away from storing stuff on the web. Google has some interesting things that are web based, (I really love Google Earth) but the company has a lured history of data mining, snooping in Gmail, and has no compunctions of dealing with totalitarian governments that are known for their overwhelming engagement in censorship, not to mention other socially negative behavior. In this case I get a bit loath about putting stuff in web based systems.

Checked out the Scrapbook extension. I will be installing it a little later. It certainly has a lot of functionality. The saving of web pages with the ability to edit them to a certain extent is intriguing. Just looking through the documentation there is a function that might work for html files on the iLiad; the Save "Output Tree as HTML" could possibly work.

If there was more html editing functions available it might really fit the bill. For me everything is about speed and ease of use because I have a lot of typing (can you spell "Cut and Paste"!) and like I stated earlier I am not very quick or good at it. I have yet to find a WYSIWYG html editor that I can use that does not require me to get mired in a steep and time consuming learning curve.

I am all about expanding my knowledge base but since I am not a software developer I don't have that foundation to work on and building it is something I just don't have the time for.

One of the things about the wiki approach is that building, indexing and linking information is far easier than anything else I have seen. Just putting links and/or bookmarks in a Word document is a head scratching affair and with the bookmarks you are hog-tied into specific conventions that do not specifically work in the Flashcard format.

One thing that would be nice about tikiwiki is that you can use it to send pages to another wiki, i.e. another instance of tikiwiki on a server. So you could possibly set it up to automatically post parts of your on-iLiad wiki to a server-based wiki somewhere, either as a backup or as a way of publishing work automatically. Just a thought. Something really simple like usemod or tiddlywiki would handle everything on the iLiad if you don't need to export.

Regarding WYSIWYG editing of html or wiki pages, tikiwiki has a WYSIWYG editor, but only for blogs. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor for an overview.