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Publishing a database as website
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Posted by Donovan
Aug 18, 2015 at 07:13 PM
Wow, Tester, what a great post and some interesting examples. I am giving RightNote another shot for a particular project where the Webbooks may come in *very* handy. Thanks for taking your time and offering some excellent information.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 18, 2015 at 08:23 PM
Tester, welcome to the forum (I myself have been missing for a while, so my welcome might be late…)
The work you’ve done is very interesting and impressive!
I suggest you take a look at Connected Text http://connectedtext.com/index.php
It is a personal wiki, meaning that it is not limited to the hierarchical structure of an outliner like MyInfo (which I think itself can surpass the strict hierarchy thanks to clones) and should well cover your organizational needs. I believe that its HTML export is very powerful—in the past the website itself was made through this export, with only some additional custom CSS. You can see a sample of such export (as Windows HTML help format, but regular HTML is also possible) here: http://connectedtext.com/Bin/Welcome.chm
Posted by Tester
Aug 18, 2015 at 09:51 PM
Donovan and Alexander, thanks for your friendly words. I am happy that my posting and the examples are of interest for you. :-)
Thanks also to Bill for his information about possible solutions for Mac users.
Some time ago (before starting to work with MyInfo) I had also tried various Wikis. Unfortunately I also could not find among them a really satisfactory solution too. The by far best Wiki (for my needs) was - and remained - “PBworks” (http://www.pbworks.com/). It is a hosted Wiki, so you need not install any software on your computer - all takes place directly in the web. But I do not know if they offer any longer the possibility to create a (free) Wiki as it existed when I started to work with it.
In general, with the Wiki of PBworks the result is excellent concerning the speed (o.k. my database there is not very big) and it is - in some fundamental aspects - excellent concerning the search possibility (especially in case that you want to publish a dictionary or something similar where the keyword search pays an important role). But in practice it is also the search feature that has some important shortcomings (perhaps not so interesting for most of you that it is useful to describe them in detail). These shortcomings were the main reason that I decided to stop for the time being the systematic work with this Wiki (though occasionally I still add another keyword). The formatting work is considerably bigger than the procedure MS Word—-> paste into MyInfo (or another outliner)—-> export as html/website. I would be willing to do this additional work, but only if I were fully satisfied with the result respectively the usability of the database/Wiki on the website. And that is not the case.
You can find my Wiki here, but only filled with about 3500 keywords: http://enalexiko.pbworks.com/w/page/60853998/Startseite
The search field is in the top right corner. You can test it for example by typing the letters ABH or ANTR (not case sensitive). A drop down list opens from which you can choose one of the (German) keywords containing these letters. Very comfortable (but unfortunately with some weak points too).
Concerning Connected Text: I had tried it also some time ago but the handling (especially formatting etc.) was by far too complicated for me. ;-)
I had also tested the function to export the data as a website. Instead of a tree Connected Text offers an index with all document titles in alphabetical groups. It can be seen also in the chm file linked by Alexander. As far as I remember there was no additional search feature. So I fear that with a large number of documents (let’s say about 20.000) this index page would get monstrous. ;-)
So at the moment on the one hand I still hope for some spectacular changes (concerning web export) in MyInfo’s next major upgrade and - as a potentially attractive alternative solution - I will continue to have in mind RightNote with its Webbook feature.
Posted by Tester
Aug 19, 2015 at 09:10 AM
In the meantime I can report some experiences with RightNote (RN) (professional version) concerning bigger amounts of data. My impression is very good!
For better understanding it is useful to know the terminology:
In RN you have a “file” (also called “notebook”). That is in essence your database. (You can have more of them too if you like.) The file/notebook consists of one or more “pages” and every page consists of “notes” (the items which are listed in the tree).
I created a file/database and imported a little more than 7000 html files (into one page). These html files were originally created by MyInfo in order to publish my dictionary in the web. Every html file represents one keyword of the dictionary (= one document in MyInfo respectively one note in RightNote after the import).
I tried it with html files because so I could fill the database in a relatively quick time. (Of course you could also create 7000 new notes directly in RN in order to test the capacity.) My first attempt failed because I tried to import too many html files at the same time. It is advisable to split the imported amount: The procedure was susccessful when I took 7 times about 1000 of the files.
After the import into RN you can immediately start to export your file/database to the webbook. This process lasted about 5 to 10 minutes (for a database of about 23.500 KB - see below).
And the amazing result came when I opened the webbook in the browser: all worked without any noticeable delay: the opening of the webbook/website itself (o.k. perhaps a small delay of 4 or 5 seconds), the opening of the tree with the thousands of items and especially both search functions (full text search and search in the tree). The search for a note respectively the search within the 7000 notes were just as quickly as in my former tests with 5 or 10 notes! That means: you type or you click the button and immediately you see the search result.
To my mind the speed when using the webbook could not be better.
When opening RN itself on your computer there is a certain delay until the file/database loads. I would say it took about 10 to 15 seconds. But this is completely acceptable for me. (I usually once open the database after starting my computer and afterwards it remains opened all the time.)
This delay corresponds with the information in the help file of RN concerning the recommended file / database size:
“A page/tree will load quickly if it only has a few hundred notes. Once there are a few thousand notes, you will see that loading time becomes slower. Bearing this in mind, performance will be best if you spread your notes over a number of pages and notebooks.
As far as file size is concerned you should probably keep your file size in the MB range i.e. less than 300 MB for best performance.”
With an amount of 7000 I have clearly hit the “few thousand notes” in my test. ;-) On the other hand many of my notes are relatively small (logical in case of a dictionary where sometimes you have only the keyword and its translation in a note). So the file/database in my test had a size by far smaller than 300 MB, namely about 23.500 KB (as already mentioned), hence only about 23 MB.
With other words: For my needs the capacity of RN seems to be by far sufficient (even considering the further growth of my dictionary or the creation of other additional databases).
Some details in RN need to be improved in any case (e.g. the full text search of the webbook which does not support German Umlaute, obviously a Unicode issue); for some other details an improvement would at least be desirable (e.g. the position and the coordination of the two search features on the interface of the webbook).
But on the whole I have the impression that RN seems to be an attractive solution - especially for people who would like to publish some database contents in the web in a quite userfriendly way. (By the way: the price for the Pro version at the moment is 59,95 $ - see http://bauerapps.com/rightnote-version-comparisons/ and http://bauerapps.com/rightnote-pricing/ .)
Posted by Tester
Aug 21, 2015 at 12:15 AM
In case that someone is interested to see how a webbook created with RightNote looks like in the web, here I discovered a good example. It is the User Guide for Right Note itself. It is not linked on RightNote’s homepage (http://bauerapps.com/rightnote/) but you can find it here:
http://www.integritysoftwaresolutions.com/FreedomFiles/RightNoteTest/web.html
(The starting pages of the webbooks are a little bit “ascetic” consisting only of two lines. ;-) You have to click on “RNUserGuide” in order to “enter” the database.)
As mentioned in a former posting, you have in the bar on top a search button for fulltext search and at the bottom of the tree a filter for searching within the note titels.