Title Information Manager
Status Planning
Start Date 9-2004

Information Manager

The modern home computer operating system can be viewed as having to deal with two things: programs and documents. The information manager is designed to handle everything about the documents side above physical storage. It's primary objectives are:

  1. Organization of documents
  2. Assistance with backup of documents
  3. An entirely integrated webserver with automatic page generation
  4. Templates for project and subproject pages
  5. Support for multiple users and anonymous users

Organization of documents will be primarily achieved by creating a specific directory structure in advance and helping the user to place new files in the proper place by checking the file extension and defaulting any uploads to the proper folder.

Backup assistance will simply keep a list of all times that each file was backed up and generate a list of files that have changed since their last backup. It will be possible to delete all list entries for a certain backup occasion if for instance a backup medium was lost.

A webpage will be largely integrated into the system and documents will be easy to publish to it through a cgi interface. By selecting the file on a cgi form, the file will be copied to the web root and a page will be automatically generated for it.

All webpages will have a consistent design by using a style wrapper page, so it will be possible to change the look of all the pages at once. There will be an online cgi wizard for creating new projects where you enter an abstract, icon, and description page. The wizard then adds its own additional formatting. The content can be modified through cgi at any later time. It will also be possible to add subprojects similarly. There will be several other templates for simple pages such as a page for just an image and caption.

It will support multiple users and track IP addresses so that it will be easy to remove all changes made by a given IP address if a malicious user uses anonymous access to post garbage.