Ingredients
  • A notebook running an OS suitable for Everything (a desktop system or even a remote server will be fine, but the idea of having the server installed in a notebook makes it more attractive and personal.
  • An Everything Server.
  • The necessary knowledge to modify Everything to suit your needs.
  • Some goals worth the effort.
naked_ape's recipe for Everything Personal Edition

As I recently discovered, Everything can be installed in Mac OSX, so I'll take a gorgeous Titanium G4 Powerbook and put an Everything server on it. But it ain't enough with that, this has to be my Everything, only for my eyes… so I've been thinking about some changes:

  • users: you're not always the same person, are you? I'll have different users for my nodes, as the purpose of filling the database with information will not be always the same. Some of these users inside of me will be:
    • dreamer (for both daydreams and night dreams).
    • inquirer (for when there are more questions than answers).
    • tale teller (for the occasional fiction or dramatized story).
    • witness (for things I've seen or experienced first hand).
    • amanuensis (for the copy & paste of articles and reference works ).
    • oracle (for the occasional work of prospective).
    • poet (this should be obvious, original works only)
    • insider (personal stuff, my mindlog)
    • techie (reports important information about my relationship with machines: configurations, stats and logs. This user can be an automated bot)
  • hardlinks: it would be cool to know which hardlinks have a node behind them and which not. Instead of creating nodeshells, being able of telling what potential nodes are still waiting to be written would be a great help to fill in the gaps of the database.
  • nodetypes: as the user will tell a lot about what kind of node is, some nodetypes will help to categorize better the database. Basically I'll have to go through each user and define some categories, like having impossible dreams, or second hand witnesses... I should do more research on this.
  • softlinks: pretty much the same as in the current Everything, created everytime you go from node to node. I'll add a checkbox to avoid creating non-desired softlinks and some system to signal the most frequently followed softlinks.
  • XP/reputation: instead of focusing a value system in the users, this would be changed to nodes. The most useful nodes will be the ones that I visit more frequently, and the ones that have a great number of softlinking. Then I just would need a simple statistics about which users have contributed the most to the database, just to balance entries or to check on what type of mind I am those days...
  • user interface: hmm, I suppose that I would need less information in screen at once, so I'll made with just a few nodelets: recent nodes, user statistics, node ranking and maybe a calendar to see nodes by its day of entry...

Once you have everything in place, it comes the hardest part: you have to feed it and maintain it. Being the unique user, you'll have to keep quiet the troll in you...