MoinMoin: PageTrailsAndSoftLinks

Hey, when did PageTrails show up? They don't seem to be documented (or even mentioned, outside UserPreferences) here on MoinMoinWiki. Anyway, it's apparent to me that this makes SoftLinks (a la EverythingTwoAtSlashdot) just a short step away. I know several people who think SoftLinks are the best thing offered by EverythingTwo, and would be really happy to have a Wiki with one.

EverythingTwo SoftLinks are automagically generated VisitorWeighted BiDirectional Visited/VisitingLinks. Every time you add a new element to your PageTrail, a SoftLink would be created between _trail[-2] and _trail[-1]. Or if such a SoftLink was already present, its usage counter would be incremented.

On EverythingTwo, SoftLinks are always displayed (in VisitorWeighted order) at the bottom of every page -- they aren't explicitly requested as BackLinks under MoinMoin are.

So, a few issues:

1. Where would a page's table of SoftLinks be stored? In a hash as

   • an attribute of the Page? Or is this more a CacheEntry sort of task?

2. How may SoftLinks be maintained? This would seem to require the

   • addition of a new interface to remove softlinks, as they aren't a part of the page text.

3. With the way MoinMoin's PageTrails work, we would have some

   • peculiar SoftLink behaviour with ParallelBrowsing. Say I'm reading a page about EggOmelets, and I fork a new tab on TeflonPans but go on to read about FreeRangeChickens. Now, if after reading about the chickens I go back to my TeflonPan tab and venture on to the CastIronPan page, my PageTrail would read:

     • EggOmelet > TeflonPans > FreeRangeChickens > CastIronPan

     but according to EverythingTwo's scheme, the softlinks should be between

     • EggOmelet - FreeRangeChicken

     • EggOmelet - TeflonPan

     • TeflonPan - CastIronPan

     Now, you could argue that either way is valid, but they do

     produce decidedly different results. Following the MoinMoin chronological PageTrail, there's no SoftLink at all between TeflonPans and CastIronPans, or EggOmeletes and FreeRangeChicknes.

Other ways to track SoftLinks might be using HttpReferer, a cookie, or a CGI parameter in the URL like EverythingTwo's lastnode_id.

See also:

• VisitedLink

• EverythingTwo:Soft%20Link