Cheat Sheet Tool

[Jim Beam]

Hi,

my opinion is, that there should be a Cheat Sheet Tool which makes it
easier to create Cheat Sheets for oneself. Best solution would be
something like a layouting tool that behaves similar to the
netvibes.com page. And then you'd just take the "windows" you need out
of a pool (which is ideally filled by a community) and put em on your
sheet like you want to.

Should not be too difficult to realize since you have YUI and MySQL
and stuff.


Regards,
Jim Beam

[Dave Child]

Hi Jim :)

I hadn't planned on mentioning this for a while, as I'm not sure how
long it's going to take me to finish, but I've been working on a
"Create-Your-Own" cheat sheet tool.

It allows you to add one URL for each block you want on the cheat
sheet. The URL can be on any server and returns an XML document
specifying the content for that block on the cheat sheet.

Using this, anyone can create a block for their own technology (think
jQuery plugin makers, homegrown CMSes, etc), or for any other
technology they like, and make it available to everyone, and keep it
up to date without needing to have me update a central repository.

To use it, you specify a list of URLs for a cheat sheet. The system
then grabs the URLs and puts them into a doc for you to arrange as you
like. You can save as HTML, PDF, PNG or JPG. Landscape and portrait
will both be supported. All cheat sheets created go into a directory
so others can grab them too.

As I say, though, I'm not sure when it will be completed. There's a
lot to do (and the security aspects are a serious concern), but I will
be posting more about it over the coming months (and of course the
members of this group will be the first to have access to all stages
of the project as it progresses).

Regards,
Dave

[Levi Watts]

Dave,

You say you have been working on a tool to satisfy this need. In what
language is the tool written in, and perhaps more importantly, would
it be open source?

Such a tool could cause the number of cheet sheets available to
exploid, with AB as a hub for both user submitted and site approved
sheets.

Levi

[Levi Watts]

I had all but forgotten about this idea until someone emailed me about it an hour ago.  Is the progress you've made or perhaps the formatting of data open source?

I've currently got a few other projects that are consuming my attention, but putting this on the horizon sounds interesting to me.  I've worked with both text to pdfs and xml for data storage, so the ability to put together such a project seems within reason.