Mike KellySep 4, 2023

Orson update

Orson was developed as part of my PhD research, and now that I am just working on some Minor Corrections to my thesis, it is no longer a funded project.

That fact, together with a recent trip to the Outer Hebrides has meant that the development rate has been slower of late. I will be starting a new job very soon too, so updates will continue to be less frequent.

However. I will continue to work on it, and treat is as a long-term project, not least because I use it daily myself, but also because it hasn't yet achieved its potential with regards to my research interests. So expect more updates in future!

Most recently I have done considerable work in updating the Orson code base from Vue2 to Vue3 (not published yet) and in getting rid of a lot of duplicated code at the same time.

As Orson is an open-source project I encourage others to get involved, particularly because of the new limits on my time. One of my goals is to improve the plugin system, in order to encourage plugin authorship by contributors.

https://orsn.io

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Orson

Open Research Notebook

Show threadPaul Graham RavenSep 4, 2023
@Lemmy I wish I had heard about Orson sooner, it looks super useful! I find myself wondering whether it could be turned to uses closer to those of Scrivener, an open-source equivalent of which I've wanted for a long time. (Writing projects are writing projects, after all... and mine have blurred the line between "academic text" and "fiction" for quite a while now!) Might have to download it and take it for a spin...
Show threadMike Kelly
@PaulGrahamRaven It is quite Scrivener-like and can certainly be used in that way! I used it for the writing process of my PhD, for example.
There is scope for custom Page types which hasn't been explored yet. Some more development in that area would enhance the possibilities for publishing projects on the web.
Sep 4, 2023 at 2:05pmWeb
Show threadPaul Graham RavenSep 4, 2023
@Lemmy I like the idea of having it running on a subdomain of one of my websites as a commonplace, too; you can (I'm told) do something like it with Obsidian, but Obsidian is a little too... too *something* for me, somehow. My current hosting looks too low grade to run Orson, but I guess fiddling with a local install is a better option before doing anything crazy on the open web, anyway.
Show threadPaul Graham RavenSep 4, 2023
@Lemmy (The thing that really sold me on it was the timeline, by the way; seems like such an obvious inclusion, but I don't know that I've seen anything like it anywhere else.)
Show threadMike KellySep 4, 2023
@PaulGrahamRaven Yes, I have a private instance which is basically a hybrid commonplace book and writing space. A basic VM works well for hosting, and you have full control over installing the required bits and pieces, e.g. https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/
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Show threadPaul Graham RavenSep 4, 2023
@Lemmy Yeah, thing is, I can dev just about well enough to run a bunch of sites via cPanel on a reseller hosting account, but levelling up to having to actually opsec a whole virtual machine myself is both more time and more code-fu than i have to spare. If my business goes well for a year or so, I might look at outsourcing it; it would open up a lot of options. But at this early stage I can't spare the money... so local install only at first. :)
Show threadMike KellySep 4, 2023
@PaulGrahamRaven Sure, I want to look into ways to make this easier for people. Perhaps I will provide a hosted option in future when I get to version 1.0.0.
Show threadPaul Graham RavenSep 4, 2023
@Lemmy Well, if it can be ported to using a fairly basic LAMP-plus stack, with similar requirements to e.g. Wordpress, that would open up a huge potential installation base... but I have no idea how (im)practical such a change would be, beyond assuming that there are probably very good reasons you chose the stack you did. :)
Show threadMike KellySep 4, 2023
@PaulGrahamRaven That one-click install is a good model to aim for :)
My thinking was to have a codebase which could run as a desktop app too, so I was pleased when I got that to work.
One possibility I may pursue is to have configurable databases from inside the application, including from the desktop app to remote web-based dbs.