January 20, 2006

Offline reading (and writing)

It's 9:45 am on a Friday. I'm sitting on VTA's Route 10 Flyer at Santa Clara CalTrain station, heading over to Metro/Airport Light Rail station. There is no Internet connection at all. I want to write a C++ based XPCOM component. I know extremely little about XPCOM strings, arrays or hashtables, other than they might be a good idea. On top of that, I've only glanced at "Creating XPCOM Components", the book by Doug Turner and Ian Oeschger, and I keep thinking that'd be a very handy reference to have. Why couldn't I just download the thing?

Ah, but I could.

The contents of www.mozilla.org are downloadable via CVS. Hooray! Now, as long as I have some idea of what I might need, I can just grab it.

The XPCOM book is just an example of a larger issue. I'm writing this blog entry from a text editor (it's now 9:51 am), because there's no offline version of MovableType's blogging system that I know of for pre-caching entries. Wikis offer wonderful capabilities (as wiki.mozilla.org and developer.mozilla.org demonstrate), but only while you're online. Bugzilla can't be searched for bugs while you're offline, which makes sense, but neither can you write partial bug reports in any little applet for later submission (or as note-taking when looking for dupes -- something even Bugzilla doesn't support so well).

We live in a world that's so interconnected, we can't help but feel a little loss when we're disconnected.

I'm serious. I do a LOT of writing. I do even more reading. As a developer, the ability to read and write content is like the air I breathe. I've no desire to suffocate.

Ultimately, I'm looking for two types of things here:

  1. Clear instructions on how I can grab a collection of written documentation at once -- from wikis, Bugzilla, cvs, Google (yeah, you, Google, let me click a few checkboxes from your search results page and give me a downloadable zip from your cache), etc.
  2. Tools that will let me write content for wikis, Bugzilla, blogs, etc. while I'm offline, even in an incomplete state, for me to submit later. SeaMonkey- and XULRunner-compatible extensions preferred. (If one's crashed, I can use the other.)

This wouldn't match what I can do online entirely, but it would save me a bunch of trouble.

Oh, I'm done writing this article -- it's 10:05 am, and the bus is arriving at the light rail station. Gotta go!

(Links added afterward.)

Posted by WeirdAl at January 20, 2006 1:43 PM
Comments

I write blog posts in my mail client (Thunderbird) and send them via SMTP to my blog provider (blogger.com), which posts them to my blog. With this setup, you could use your mail client's support for offline message composition to write blog posts while disconnected.

Posted by: Myk Melez at January 20, 2006 3:56 PM

I assume you did notice the PDF version of CXC on the page you linked, right? You probably didn't have it when writing the entry, but it's perfectly downloadable.

(From Alex: Yes, I did.)

Posted by: Jeff Walden at January 20, 2006 7:30 PM

I believe the tool you're looking for is call a "text editor" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor for a more complete description). Their functionality has not been affected by the propogation of online web tools. I personally prefer vim, but am told that many others also exist.

:P

(From Alex: Har de har har...)

Posted by: Andrew Schultz at January 21, 2006 9:32 AM

Regarding the offline Bugzilla, I remember a MozillaZine article about an offline Bugzilla GUI that sync's with the live Bugzilla when needed. http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=7175 Might be what you need.

Posted by: BlueMM at January 22, 2006 3:46 PM

Hm, I'm surprised no one's pointed out that WordPress supports the Blogger, MetaWeblog, and Movable Type APIs (XML-RPC). They all provide getting and posting entries. There are clients available for all platforms.

Posted by: Nikolas Coukouma at January 30, 2006 4:11 PM