Self-Organizing Hypertext Notebooks (Jrju)

Richard Rathe 1997 (Programming)

Jrju (Chinese for spider) is a Perl program that weaves hypertext 'notebooks' from plain text files. An author creates notebook pages using the JTX markup format. Jrju will process a directory of JTX files into a cross-linked collection of HTML pages. Jrju rebuilds the entire notebook each time so there are no broken links or orphan pages.

I originally wrote Jrju in Hypercard for personal use. Once the World Wide Web came into existence I converted it to Perl & HTML.

In the sample page above, the hierarchical address appears as the links near the top. More importantly all the places that page was linked from are listed at the bottom under Related Topics.

There are two example notebooks preserved here…

The Jrju Users Manual

• The obvious first use of a new documentation system is to document that system!

The Primary Care Baseline Project

• This was my attempt to enlist other physicians to contribute their expertise. It never really got off the ground.😕

The plain text format was very simple. The Perl script is included here for anyone interested.

Note that THE CLINICAL INFORMATION IS OUT OF DATE and many of the non-local links are broken. I've preserved the originals here for historical purposes only!