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  • From: Bear K <bear@ursine-design.com>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] Blogs, USDA Plants, and data interchange
  • Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 23:22:20 -0800

Hi folks,

Good discussion, and thanks Sean. I knew and thought Plants should have a reasonable interface to access their information. Now, I wonder if they also might provide the plant info in an XML format, not just HTML. It would seem likely that they'd provide XML or some other better interchange format, CSV or something a bit cleaner.

If we do indeed grab info from other DB's, here's another place where "info as comment" would come into play, so we could assign a source to it and credit it. You'll notice the Plants DB has an interlinked relationship with CalPhoto, and other photo archives, not all the info resides on USDA servers, but they know if one of the archives has photos of X....it would be great to set up links between DB's like this, and move on from there.

Re: blogs...
After checking out CivicSpace (a branch of the Drupal CMS which arose out of the Dean campaign) liking it, and seeing that the templating system was vastly improved since I last looked, I decided to try porting PIW to it.

You can see it here: www.openpermaculture.org/civicspace

Note: design not complete, some layout bugs with the footer, and the sidebar should get reworked, but it runs. It would need PHP and a mySQL DB.
There are some pretty nice features, blogs, collaborative book writing, membership management (remember, it's designed for civic organizations and running campaigns), volunteer organization, RSS syndication (OpenPermaculture comes to mind), etc.

I think it would be cool to try using it. We'd want to develop a bit of a "style guide", not so much in regards to grammar, but what do we want the public to see, how do we present ourselves through our posts? I wouldn't mind if we posted some of the interesting possibilities of where this could go, cool tools that are out there, etc. But we'd probably want a category for "dreaming", stuff thats really exciting, but, lets not get people thinking the functionality is coming out in 2 months. Maybe inspire them, and draw in other collaborat[ions | ors ] through it though?

OK, 'nough said for now.

Cheers all,
Bear





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