deX α

a note: a friend pointed out to me that this system contains multiple serious security holes. I will probably never get around to fixing them. If you want to use deX do not put anything sensitive into it or put it in a database containing other important information; in fact, do not use this at all unless you know exactly what you are doing.

 If somebody feels moved to sanitize all the inputs and patch up the rest of the holes that person will have my eternal gratitude.

deX is

a little project of mine designed to help organize notes, in the spirit of theTomboy project for GNOME. The goal is to provide an automated cross-referencing service as well as some date recognition, in order to easily see related notes. It is extremely lightweight and easy to set up.

how it works

After a note is entered into the system, it is tagged with all the dates it contains. deX currently recognizing just about anything that PHP’s time() can deal with, so things like “last tuesday” work just as well as “10/16/07″. Once these dates are indexed, it’s easy to quickly generate calendars, todo lists, and just about any other sort of ordering you can come up with.

When notes are retrieved, another layer of content is added to them. Strings of capitalized words are recognized as keywords, and each entry page shows related entries.

check it out

There’s a working one set up here - just go to dex.jacobandreas.net.

deX is not

• “smart” - the system does not understand notes’ semantic content, and there’s no context-sensitive mumbo-jumbo going on. The system is designed to be as light as possible, and judicious use of capital letters will do all the linking that should be necessary in most cases
• guaranteed to be secure - while I’m fairly sure the system is safe against mySQL injection and other such dispicable acts, I have very little experience in this area and can make no guarantees about deX’s safety. If you find a security hole, I would be enormously appreciative if you would let me know - my email is jqubit [at] gmail [dot] com.
• guaranteed to be stable - this is an alpha version, which is to say the feature set is not complete and it is probably riddled with bugs. Again, when you find them let me know.

installation

1. Download the archive
2. Extract it
3. Fill in db_open.php with your server information, username and password.
4. Fill in the top of index.php with your user information. Please note that at present the system only supports one user.
5. Upload the files to your server
6. Visit install.php. If it gives you errors, make sure that you’ve followed all of the above instructions correctly
7. Remove install.php (you can actually leave it there as it’s not possible to do any damage with it, but you might as well clean up after yourself)
8. Enjoy!

future plans

• Automatic retrieval of dates as is currently done with keywords
• Major code cleanup
• Support for reading notes from twitter feeds, with the ultimate goal of being able to post notes via SMS

license

Until I get around to doing my licensing homework, deX is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 2) available here. Please note that this designation is subject to change at any time.

hate mail, love mail and offers of employment

should be directed to jqubit [at] gmail [dot] com