The OWW Lab Notebook is available for your investigation on the main wiki.<br><br>You must be logged in to use the Lab Notebook.<br><br>To enable OWW Lab Notebook for your OWW account, simply go to the "my preferences" page (
<a href="http://openwetware.org/wiki/Special:Preferences">http://openwetware.org/wiki/Special:Preferences</a>) and select the "Misc" tab at the far right.<br><br>The OWW Lab Notebook pages are not populated until you enable it for your account. However, if you choose to turn off the Lab Notebook features, an data you have collected will remain intact. There is never a place where we will be deleting data. This is an absolutely cardinal rule. As you may know, the MediaWiki application creates a new copy of any document as soon as a change is saved to the database. We are doing nothing to interfere with this absolutely critical feature of MediaWiki.
<br><br>Clicking on the "Enable Lab Notebook" checkbox and saving the new value will make it accessible. <br><br>Once it's enables, you should see a new "My Lab Notebook" link added to the end of the list of entries in the top right hand corner of your screen.
<br><br> Click on the "My Lab Notebook" link to access the Lab Notebook. <br><br>Please note: this is not all there yet There's still more to come. <br><br>Later tonight (1/14/2008), I'll turn on the page reformatting feature. I have a few more tests to run and this feature will be enabled.
<br><br>I also need to finish a few changes that will allow each user to optionally control the format of all of the pages they create.<br><br>I'll send an update when both of these features are turned on.<br><br>I'm hoping to have a preliminary version of a modified OWW Search box that will only search pages within the Lab Notebook by the end of the week.
<br><br>Currently, the only use option for the Lab Notebook is to enter content by date and have it displayed by Project. We'll have a version that works the opposite online soon that allows for the opposite: enter by product but view the entries by date.
<br><br>In both cases, you can also view and edit the original date and project entries. <br><br><br>There's a discussion page for Lab Notebook at the following URL:<br><br><a href="http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Lab_Notebooks/Discussion">
http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Lab_Notebooks/Discussion</a><br><br>Please provide feedback. This is a preliminary version. <br><br>There's an overview document at the following location:<br>
<br><a href="http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Lab_Notebooks/Overview">http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Lab_Notebooks/Overview</a><br><br>The following is a list of templates currently used in the Lab Notebook:
<br><br>Template:LnNotebookCreate<br>Template:LnNotebookView<br>Template:LnNotebookCalendar<br>Template:LnNotebookIcon<br><br>Template:LnProjectBaseModify<br>Template:LnProjectCreate<br>Template:LnProjectView<br><br>Template:LnEntries
<br>Template:LnEntryCurrent<br>Template:LnEntryDateHeader<br>Template:LnEntryImage<br>Template:LnEntryNavigate<br><br>The templates work in conjunction with a set of extensions. The extensions and templates share a common internal structure. There is a set of variables which we will be documenting that are accessible via the MediaWiki Template languages. I'll provide more details when the initial components are all up and running.
<br><br>Be cautions if you immediately want to use this for your work. Any information entered into the Lab Notebook will be safe. But the Project display pages still are being tweaked. As I said, I will send out an update message later this evening.
<br><br>What you see is how I've initial set of the components together: the layout is not carved in stone. This is more of an erector set than a static application. <br><br>Please sound off about what you need this thing to do that it doesn't look as if it will do now. We want to grow this out to meet as many requirements aswe can.
<br><br><br>Thanks.<br><br>Bill Flanagan<br><br><br><br><br>