It is a constant annoyance that I have been feeling like always being at the edge of loosing control of life, of loosing track of important issues like mails, tasks, appointments. And it is indeed incredible: around 6.000 incoming mails last year, not counting numerous (some of them high volume) mailing lists, not counting mails on my private accounts, my calendar getting filled at alarming rates already months ahead, to-dos spread all over paper notes, electronic notes, wiki systems etc.

I have recently tried out several solutions to improve the efficiency:

• I have learned to love RememberTheMilk as an online to-do list manager. Beyond the rigidity of lists and hierarchies of lists, RememberTheMilk offers a multitude of possibilities to organize your to-dos, which is important to me (I have currently more than 150 open issues): lists, tags, locations, priorities. And all of this with a multitude of interfaces. I particularly like the sidebar and the Gmail integration (only for Firefox so far, not for Opera), but also the possibilities to have the deadlines of tasks as an iCal feed (nice for conference deadlines). The only thing RTM does not do so far: it does not complete your tasks automatically
• I recently got an invitation for XOBNI, which is an email analysis and navigation tool. Currently, there is an Outlook plug-in that provides very quick searches (also for a 5 GB mailbox), much quicker than Google Desktop, but also reliable threading of conversations (similar to GMail), quick access to attachments, and navigating access to your social network (as represented in your email conversations). And everything context-aware. This especially tackles an key problem of my email environment: getting the context of the discussion and quick access to previous messages. You can also see interesting graphs about your own email behaviour (e.g., average response times, email hours etc.) and that of your network members. Everything simple, nice-looking, and fast. If you are interested – I have still a limited amount of invites left.

The rest of my solutions mainly tackle self-discipline and making adequate use of existing possibilities:

• Make use of automatic filtering of email as much as possible: sort different contexts into different folders (e.g., projects) to give you back the power of deciding when to switch the context.
• Use RSS instead of newsletters: Google Reader (and probably any other newsreader) is much more suitable tool than a newsletter in your inbox.
• Tag messages not only according to context, but also according to their processing status: it is not GTD, but tagging messages for “to do”, “waiting”, and for “to read” (for actually learning about new things, trying out new tools, reading recommended papers etc.) is helpful not to loose control.

Wikis are popular intranet tools in which teams collaboratively develop a shared knowledge base. So far, however, there has often been the problem that wikis were not available (even read-only) offline, e.g., when traveling.

Google Gears is an interesting new technology to solve the problem of offline web applications in a surprisingly easy way. In order to try out the potential of it, I have recently tried to apply it to the MediaWiki system (actually a Semantic MediaWiki installation).

What do you have to do?

• Create a folder gears in your MediaWiki installation directory
• Download the gears_init.js from the Google Gears web site and place it in the newly created folder
• Download the gears_offline.js from the Google Gears tutorial
• Modify the manifest file name in this file to a php script, e.g. manifest.php
• Create the manifest.php that creates the file list on the fly (based on access to the database):

{
“betaManifestVersion”: 1,
<?php
$l = mysql_connect(‘localhost’,’user‘,’pass‘);
mysql_selectdb(‘mediawikidbname‘);
  $q = “SELECT max(rc_timestamp) from recentchanges”
$r = mysql_query($q);
$t = mysql_fetch_row($r);
  echo ‘”version”: “‘ . $t[0] . ‘”,’;
?>

“entries”:
[

<?php
$q = "SELECT page_title from page"
$r = mysql_query($q);
 while ($t = mysql_fetch_row($r))
{
echo '{ "url": "/index.php/' . $t[0] . ‘” },’;
}
  echo ‘{ “url”: “/index.php/Main” }’;
?>
]
}

• Modify the MonoBook.php skin file (or any other skin you are using):
  • Include the two javascript files in the header section
  • add “init()” to body onload
  • add a link somewhere on the page (e.g., footer) invoking the javascript function createStore()
  • add a placeholder <span id=’textOut’></span> somewhere for status messages, e.g. in the footer

Of course, the approach is quite a hack and does not scale for large wikis because there is always a complete replication of online content as soon as some change occurred (this could be made smarter by not leaving everything to Gears, but implementing your own update strategy). Likewise, offline search, editing, and other cool features are not available (this would require much more effort towards AJAXifying MediaWiki). So this simple solution just provides the possibility of offline reading – and this transparently to the user (and within less than one hour .

Technorati tags: MediaWiki, Gears