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Last post Author Topic: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?  (Read 23049 times)

wraith808

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #25 on: September 12, 2019, 05:46 PM »
It uses the database on the Clibu server.

That means it does call somewhere to register, correct?  It just happens to call to you.  Am I parsing that correctly?

nevf

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #26 on: September 12, 2019, 06:51 PM »
It uses the database on the Clibu server.

That means it does call somewhere to register, correct?  It just happens to call to you.  Am I parsing that correctly?

Clibu consists of a Browser App and a Cloud Server app which communicate back and forth. User registration is handled back on the server, so yes it calls our server.
Neville Franks, Clibu a better way to collect, use, manage and share information across all devices.

Shades

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #27 on: September 12, 2019, 08:46 PM »
Which of these programs can effectively post to the Net? (presumably by creating an HTML file).

Allowing that you may have to purchase a domain name and use your hosting platform.
i seem to remember one of the old school ones was good at this like TreedbNotes.  but im pretty sure rightnote can export to html.  onenote cannot directly, but you can export to word and then from word save as html.

Friends don't let friends use word to convert anything to HTML. Just saying...

As an example:
I have an extensive Word document. The docx version is almost 6 MByte in size. After I do a manual conversion to HTML, the resulting document is a bit over 4 MByte in size. When I use Word as converter, the resulting HTML file is almost 17.5 MByte in size. This Word document I have also converted to the AsciiDoc format and that is just shy of 2 MByte in size.

Any version of Word creates a pile of drudge when converting a document to HTML.
 

wraith808

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #28 on: September 12, 2019, 11:36 PM »
It uses the database on the Clibu server.

That means it does call somewhere to register, correct?  It just happens to call to you.  Am I parsing that correctly?

Clibu consists of a Browser App and a Cloud Server app which communicate back and forth. User registration is handled back on the server, so yes it calls our server.


So even with the following feature from your prior post:

This stores all data locally, and will have offline support with synchronization to other devices should you wish to use that.

You will still need to be connected to your servers to use the software?

superboyac

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #29 on: September 13, 2019, 01:56 PM »
Which of these programs can effectively post to the Net? (presumably by creating an HTML file).

Allowing that you may have to purchase a domain name and use your hosting platform.
i seem to remember one of the old school ones was good at this like TreedbNotes.  but im pretty sure rightnote can export to html.  onenote cannot directly, but you can export to word and then from word save as html.

Friends don't let friends use word to convert anything to HTML. Just saying...

As an example:
I have an extensive Word document. The docx version is almost 6 MByte in size. After I do a manual conversion to HTML, the resulting document is a bit over 4 MByte in size. When I use Word as converter, the resulting HTML file is almost 17.5 MByte in size. This Word document I have also converted to the AsciiDoc format and that is just shy of 2 MByte in size.

Any version of Word creates a pile of drudge when converting a document to HTML.
 
yes, true!  lol
MS sucks at import/export.  Onenote is no exception.  It's why I'm currently worried with their latest move to "Onenote" [no version year/number anymore].  Even if you could export, no other software is laid out like onenote.  usually they are hierarchical, not just a big anything goes whiteboard.

nevf

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #30 on: September 13, 2019, 05:27 PM »
It uses the database on the Clibu server.

That means it does call somewhere to register, correct?  It just happens to call to you.  Am I parsing that correctly?

Clibu consists of a Browser App and a Cloud Server app which communicate back and forth. User registration is handled back on the server, so yes it calls our server.


So even with the following feature from your prior post:

This stores all data locally, and will have offline support with synchronization to other devices should you wish to use that.

You will still need to be connected to your servers to use the software?

Apologies there is some confusion here. Clibu currently stores all data on the server, with some duplicated in the Browser.

The new app I'm developing, which I have written a bit about on the Clibu blog (along with live demos) and have mentioned here, stores all data locally.  It will eventually be able to run entirely in the Browser, even without any Internet connection. In order to get the full benefits of automagic sync across devices, secure cloud backup etc. then connection to the server would be needed. This will be optional. I hope that clears things up.
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wraith808

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #31 on: September 14, 2019, 12:41 AM »
Ah... that clears things up.  I thought you were saying that Clibu was that piece of software.  Thanks for that clarification!  :Thmbsup:

app103

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #32 on: September 22, 2019, 11:54 PM »
Yep its me. I did try to update the activation but was unable to because eSellerate no longer had the users registration details. When that failed I created a new free license coupon which I sent. Unfortunately this didn't work because eSellerate seem to have been merged into another company (Sharit?) and their order system no longer works. Unfortunately this is out of my hands and there is nothing more I can do. In hindsight using a 3rd party to handle licensing was not the best of ideas.

So to say that I was not very helpful is pretty disappointing.

I never said that you never tried to help. I said that you were not very helpful, and seeing as I still can't activate my license and my databases are still in read-only mode, I'd say that was accurate.

Surfulater does not have any Export capability, so it isn't possible to Import it into our new app Clibu.

Speaking of export capabilities, the option to export Surfulater databases to HTML is disabled, unless you can activate a license.

I had considered exporting and then manually copying to AllMyNotes, to try to get around that crashing issue it has, but the option is currently grayed out in Surfulater. :(

I am quietly working on the next major version (rewrite) of Clibu. This stores all data locally, and will have offline support with synchronization to other devices should you wish to use that. It will also have local backups. For more information see the Clibu Blog which has links to early sample apps. The next sample release will have basic Note editing.

Will it copy any of my data "to the cloud"? Will it require a user name and password for offline access? Will I be able to create separate databases, like I could with Surfulater, and link shortcuts to them on my desktop...or does one have access to everything, when they open the app? Can I use links to files & folders on my computer, in entries?

I was in the process of compiling an info database for my daughter, in Surfulater, containing everything she would need to know, in the event of my death (I am about half done).

There's a lot of sensitive info in there that I do not want sitting in the cloud, at the mercy of hackers. I don't want her to have to figure out what my user name and password for it is, or what website she has to go to, to login. I also don't want the chance that you or another 3rd party might have access to it, or if you decide to sell off your project to another developer who can then access my data, or that my data will vanish if your servers have a mishap. Or that you might decide to change your terms and notify me some day that I have to start paying you a reoccurring subscription fee or you'll delete my data.

PS. Full disk image backups are a good idea and help greatly when disaster strikes.

My databases were backed up in triplicate. My setup files and license key for both V2 and V3 were backed up in triplicate, plus in my e-mail account. I even have the old Firefox add-ons that no longer work, backed up in triplicate.

My only loss in this disaster is Surfulater. It is the only app that I can not get working again.

I would have suffered the same issue if I had tried to voluntarily migrate to an SSD, with a clean slate. Or are you suggesting that nobody should ever do that?

To answer the original question: Clibu.

I know you wish that were the case, but because of cloud involvement, it's disqualified.

Surfulater was a wonderful application, for which there seems to be no real replacement. This was the case when I started using it, back in 2006, and it still holds true, today.

And it is heartbreaking that you have abandoned it.


tsaint

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #33 on: September 23, 2019, 08:22 AM »
Have to agree, in part, with App103.
I thought Surfulater was excellent for my needs, way back. For various reasons, stopped using it but last 6 months, have felt like using it again. Seems it would be pointless to try tho, sadly.

Re Clibu: "Clibu is completely free at this time. At some point we’ll charge - if you can afford a cup of coffee a month you’ll be able to afford to use Clibu."
Well, I can't.

That sounds fine, but how about all the other softwares with subscriptions also costing a coffee (or more) each? Since I retired from the work force, with its attendant severe drop in disposable income, I can't afford several coffees/month. I'm stretched with the photoshop cc subscription, and won't drop those coffees for a Clibu coffee, attractive as Clibu sounds.

Wish I could afford the Kindle Unlimited and various music subscriptions too, all who present variations on the "only a cup of coffee" theme.

app103

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #34 on: September 23, 2019, 09:54 AM »
Re Clibu: "Clibu is completely free at this time. At some point we’ll charge - if you can afford a cup of coffee a month you’ll be able to afford to use Clibu."
Well, I can't.

That sounds fine, but how about all the other softwares with subscriptions also costing a coffee (or more) each? Since I retired from the work force, with its attendant severe drop in disposable income, I can't afford several coffees/month. I'm stretched with the photoshop cc subscription, and won't drop those coffees for a Clibu coffee, attractive as Clibu sounds.

Wish I could afford the Kindle Unlimited and various music subscriptions too, all who present variations on the "only a cup of coffee" theme.


Also, most variations on the "only a cup of coffee" theme, seem to indicate that nobody brews coffee at home any more. They all seem to go to Starbucks and buy the biggest, highest priced fancy coffee on the menu.

IainB

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #35 on: September 23, 2019, 09:56 AM »
Re Clibu: "Clibu is completely free at this time. At some point we’ll charge - if you can afford a cup of coffee a month you’ll be able to afford to use Clibu."
Well, I can't.
Have to agree. The "price of a cup of coffee" metaphor tends to be lazy and ignorant marketing BS spouted by con merchants. Why can't people do things for themselves?
I stopped buying coffees or taking clients to cafés and buying them coffees for a chat years ago, after totting up the annual cost on my marketing budget. I also detest coffee shops as they tend to lack privacy. Nowadays, I take 'em out for an occasional meal instead, and meet them for ad hoc chats in offices where we can discuss things in private and make the coffee, or tea, etc. ourselves in a kitchenette, from preselected ground coffee or preselected leaf teas.
At work or home, If I want a coffee or cup of tea (which may be be several times a day), then I make it myself, using my favourite fresh ground coffees or leaf teas selected from the supermarket (there's always a wide choice for coffee) and (for teas) a local Chinese supermarket. The price per cup is then very cheap, the quality is good and I have become quite good at making nice coffees/teas.
I have some very good Iranian friends whom I visit to give English lessons (conversational and written technical English). Always a pleasure, as the husband makes some of the best Persian-style coffee in the city (in my view). He's taught me how to do it too, but it's a definite skill. He's an MD, but he learned about making coffee whilst working in an Iranian cafe, from a purist coffee-maker as his teacher.

migla9

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #36 on: September 23, 2019, 01:31 PM »
Surfulater does not have any Export capability, so it isn't possible to Import it into our new app Clibu.

While it's not possible for your paying customers to do this, as developer of both products, surely you do still have the Surfulater file format information to be able to import it into Clibu, should you chose to do so.

app103

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #37 on: September 26, 2019, 06:27 AM »
So, I have decided to take a shot at using a multi-site installation of Wordpress, as an alternative to Surfulater. It's set up locally, only accessible on my LAN, and I have decided to call it Packrat Palace. :)

Bitnami makes it really easy to set up on Windows, with an installer that contains everything you need, preconfigured. So, you won't need to go through all the steps of installing and configuring Apache, and MySQL or MariaDB, and PHP, and Wordpress (with all the steps involved with that), and configuring Wordpress to be multisite. It's a single .exe that does it all for you, and when it's finished, you just log into your multi-site and go.

Because mine is not publicly accessible, on the internet, there's a lot of the typical plugins I won't need, such as SEO, anti-spam, contact forms, social widgets, ads, analytics, etc. That will free up resources and page space to concentrate on useful features.

And there's lots of great plugins to do plenty of useful, interesting things, so I'll have a lot of freedom with it, to add or remove features, as I go along, perhaps even with various plugins I might not have considered on a publicly accessible site (such as PHP Everywhere). Different layout & design themes and plug-in combinations for each "notebook" is also possible. And I have both tags and nested categories available to use, right out of the box.

Everything used is free and open source, but there's also the possibility of using premium plugins, if they prove to be useful.

So, here's an early stage of what I have going on. There's not much actual content added, yet, but it does illustrate the basic framework of the whole concept.

Front page of main "notebook" will display 5 most recent items from each main category, with a search bar above the whole thing.

Screenshot - 9_26_2019 , 6_27_39 AM.pngWhat are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

Table of Contents tab, which also features a search bar.

Screenshot - 9_26_2019 , 6_28_44 AM.pngWhat are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

Articles, with search bar on the right. It's also possible for longer articles to have their own table of contents, embedded at the top, to jump to various sections. I do plan on setting up conditional sidebar widgets that will display a table of contents focused only on the category currently being viewed.

Screenshot - 9_26_2019 , 6_29_49 AM.pngWhat are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

Oh, by the way, one thing I did have a problem with is logging into the multi-site on my LAN. Google decided (for security reasons) that nobody should ever want to log into a website whose URL is an IP address (unless it's 127.0.0.1) or a single word without a TLD (unless it's localhost), so Chrome, and any other Chromium/Webkit based based browser, can't log into anything where the URL is something like http://snax/ without displaying an error complaining that you don't have cookies enabled in your browser. (and there's no setting that I could find that can change this behavior)

Finding a browser that isn't Chromium/Webkit based is getting much more difficult, as time goes on. :(  (this is another example of why monopolies are bad and diversity is good)

There's the obvious choice of using IE, but that's not really much of an option any more, and I wouldn't consider it for any modern HTML5 site, not even locally, because stuff just breaks or looks messed up, because IE just too old and janky to play well with newer things.

Then there's Pale Moon, which had no trouble logging in, but it had compatibility issues with the Wordpress post editor, stuck in plain text mode, with no tabs to switch to view mode. That would work fine, if you can think in HTML, or only want to capture plain text, but being able to see your formatting as you compose your posts has obvious merits.

That left me with K-Meleon, which for now (v75.1), is working pretty good, with both the site URL and working with Wordpress. This could change, once the Goanna engine (same as Pale Moon) becomes the default in the official stable release., though, so if you plan on doing something similar, grab a pre-Goanna portable version to squirrel away, just in case.

Shades

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #38 on: September 26, 2019, 12:08 PM »
I have no problem surfing with any browser on any system here internally to visit my 'internal only' mediawiki installation. Which can be accessed by typing the following: http://192.168.1.1/wiki     Works in FireFox, Palemoon, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Edge (both).

Chrome/Chromium-based browsers do have the issue as reported when using names. But that's because these browsers consult external DNS servers first and these don't know about your internally hosted website(s), so that ends up in a fail.

To combat that is to run your own DNS server internally and configure on your router (or the device that hands out the IP addresses in your LAN) to use the internal DNS server as primary and the external DNS server of your choice as secondary, tertiary etc. That's what I have done here and works for the Chrome/Chromium-based browsers.

Way too much effort for a standard home network setup? Sure. But you must keep the Chrome/Chromium-based browser fanatics appeased. Even if you can show that FF is the better browser in this regard.

app103

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Re: What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?
« Reply #39 on: September 26, 2019, 10:18 PM »
Even if you can show that FF is the better browser in this regard.

But isn't the current FF Chromium based?

In any case, I did manage to fix the issue, without running my own DNS server internally or configuring anything in my router (which isn't as power user friendly as most, and can only be configured by logging into ISP's website)

I attacked the problem as a cookie issue, rather than a DNS issue, and was able to fix it with an additional line in my wp-config file.  Found solutions to other similar problems and put it all in a blog post.