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Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.
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Cambrian House began as a crowdsourcing community using a wisdom of crowds based approach to discover new business and technology ideas. These pages are being kept online as a technology demo to showcase Chaordix™.

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Personal crib-sheet w/ tagging + sharing

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  • Submitted by: branchcut
  • Created: Jul 17, 2006, 10:00 am
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The Idea

An online "crib-sheet", otherwise known as a "cheat sheet", "cookbook", "knowledge base", or "HOWTO database". It would be organized like del.ici.ous and support both tagging and sharing. Unlike del.ici.ous however, the site would host the actual data, provide a concise view that maximizes screen real estate (show titles in multiple-columns after clicking a tag), and provide nice templates for the data. As every programmer knows, a crib-sheet is highly useful for avoiding digging through large amounts of code to find out how they accomplished a particular task in the past. Aside from coders, most IT professionals and other types of knowledge workers could benefit from such a thing. Gamers, people who cook, and many others could also utilize something like this. An example entry for a gamer might be TITLE: Kill the 7 armed beast on 7th level TAGS: quake, beast, level7 TEXT: Go push the red button under the stairs, it will lock the beast in a cage and it can be easily killed.

I thought of this idea when I was...

... started keeping my programming crib sheets in text files and then finally moved onto a custom-built online database which has been a total dream. Well, its been a dream so far, but I'm starting to want other features like tagging and sharing, and I don't want to invest too much time into it -- I'd rather have some company maintaining it. It seems every programmer needs something like this, since they are often juggling many different languages and technologies, and I'm sure many other types of knowledge workers would benefit immensely. Since the site could be totally generic as to what type of content is contained in the cheats, it could be used for anything from recipes to tips on fixing cars.


Comments Posted

Justice
Justice Posted: July 24, 2006, 11:16 pm

This could be useful if the data was organized well. It's nice to have common design patterns all in one place.

branchcut
branchcut Posted: July 25, 2006, 7:54 am

RE: Justice. The site should impose some basic organization on your data and give you the opportunity to do further customization to make things really well organized. For example, del.ici.ous has a feature where you can cluster your tags into "genres" (forget what they call it), which makes the tag cloud appear far more organized. I think the proposed site should be designed almost identical to del.ici.ous except to have a much more compact display on the result page after clicking a tag. Some tags will grow to hundreds of entries and users will want to be able to easily scan what they are looking for. Also it might make sense to sub-group by secondary tags ... for example, clicking the "ruby" tag will show all ruby cheats, but then subgrouped by "xml", "smtp", and so forth. By the way the main difference between the proposed site and del.ici.ous is that while del.ici.ous just hosts pointers to offsite data, this site would also host all the date as well as have nice rendering templates for the different types of data (eg, nice code formatting when applicable).

techguy
techguy Posted: August 10, 2006, 12:05 am

I think calling this a cheat sheet confuses me to no end.

I'm also not sure how the data would be entered and stored. Is only text allowed? I'm confused how you would add new "cheat sheets." I think the idea of tagging data to organize it has some real merit, but it seems like this idea might be too broad right now.

branchcut
branchcut Posted: August 10, 2006, 12:09 pm

RE: Techguy. I tried re-wording it a bit, thanks for the feedback. As far as data entry, it is dead simple .. just a simple three-field form that accepts a title, one or more tags, and the actual content of the item. The item content would be text-only.

 

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