There was an interesting discussion at slashdot about a new piece of software by IBM called History Flow. I filled out page after page of personal information to be able to download a copy to look at. It's an interesting take on how to represent a bunch of diffs. I can see something like this being really useful (although it's still in a very preliminary form now). Someone in the discussion pointed to this analysis of the history of a wiki page, which is not really related, but is a cool example of the kinds of things you'd like a tool to help you discover.

I've generally been really happy with the way PHPwiki represents the pagehistory. I use wikis not only to work on projects, but also to evaluate my students' writing. For my purposes, it's worked really well. (I've been less happy with Tikiwiki, which has lame tools for comparing versions). With PHPwiki, I can get a reasonable overview of the history and then go in and look at a variety of key points. But the idea that I could have a graphical representation that would give me more information about what they key points were -- that could be really useful and make the process both more efficient and more accurate.

For a long time, I've been meaning to write an article about the Aŭtuna Renkontiĝo de Esperanto (ARE). ARE is one of the best Esperanto events ever. Last fall, Normando asked me to part of the organizing committee for next year. I've set up a page and created a page with a rough draft. I sent out a note to the mailing list -- maybe some other folks will be interested in making comments or contributing.

While I was posting, I noticed that, for the second time in a handful of days, I got someone spamming the wiki with garbage from the same IP address.. So, I dropped in a .htaccess file that excludes that IP and hopefully that will end the problem. Otherwise, I can turn on the setting that requires people to sign-in. You don't need a password -- just to sign in using a wikiword. That will probably be enough to throw off the robots and losers. It's happened once or twice in the past, but this looks like it was aimed at two PHPwiki pages in particular: the RecentVisitors and MoreAboutMechanics pages.

StevenBrewer