Whoa, where’d the spike in readers come from? Feedburner reported 27 yesterday and then today it somehow jumped to 40. Not that I mind, of course. :) And I finally have something to say again, after the somewhat long break.
What I feel I need in my own research, at least as an interim solution for now, is this: a (very) lightweight system which lets me capture everything and gets out of my way. What I have in mind is Beast, but for genealogy:
Not only is the design nice and clean, but their goal is 500 lines of code. And that’s a good thing, I think, because it forces you to rethink how you do a lot of things.
What does this mean for genealogy? What’s the bare minimum? I’ve thought about it a bit and I think the easiest way to pull this off would be to store the data in a wiki. Markdown or Textile would make editing very easy, and the database would be extremely simple (id, name, and wiki page). Rather than linking people in the database, it would use specialized HTML links.
This kind of a slimmed-down app would obviously not have much in the way of visualization or analysis, but that’s okay — at this point I just need something to store my research in. Nor would I need it to be a multi-user app, at least not yet — that can wait. Bare minimum, no more.
The best part is that all of this fat-trimming makes the app much easier to write. (Granted, fitting it all into a few hundred lines of code won’t exactly be kid’s play, but the less functionality there is, the easier it is to reach completion.) This is something I might actually be able to pull off with my hectic schedule. The geek in me wants to hack it all together in a single weekend. We’ll see. :)
By way of clarification, I don’t mean that the ultimate be-all, end-all of genealogy will be written in less than 1,000 lines of code, of course. But I do think that a Beastly app will be a nice, clean solution for the time being, and I need a nice, clean app if I’m to want to do my genealogy in it. Psychological satisfaction is important.
In the meantime, a semi-usable hack would be to use a combination of Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Backpack. Or install some wiki software. Speaking of which, one might ask why on earth I’d bother with creating a new system when I could easily just use a pre-existing wiki package like MediaWiki. I’m still not entirely sure, but the lightweight factor is the most appealing part of this project for me. I need something small. No bloat.
[tags]genealogy, Markdown, Textile, Beast, Google, Backpack[/tags]