CardOverflow VS anki-connect

I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres, but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I started to write my own IndexedDB wrapper, then said "you're a moron" and switched to CouchDb/PouchDb/RxDB. I also wanted to support plugins. I thought I figured that out with Blazor, but eventually I realized that more powerful plugins would want to manipulate the DOM directly. Blazor's virtual DOM kills that possibility. So, I'm off the dotnet ecosystem (I can't express how very, very sad I am to leave F#) and onto Typescript + SolidJS. I would've gone ReScript but that's tightly coupled to React which uses the VDom. Perhaps I should be using Svelte - I'm not solid on any of this new architecture yet. So my project has not yet entirely failed... I just realized I spent ~2 years on the wrong architecture.

The carcass of my attempt in dotnet: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

FWIW I'm building something from the ground up that'll have this sharing/social thang built in. I also (obviously) think that there's a need for collaborative tools for building and sharing cards, along with perhaps ways to publish your progress. For various reasons I'm not building it on Anki though.

I'm building the above thing here: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Not only considered - I'm actively using it. You'll find people complaining about IndexedDB's API all over the internet. They're right - it's remarkably terrible. I'm using Dexie.JS as a wrapper over it.

I'm working on an open source edtech website. Prelaunch, but I wouldn't mind talking shop. In the western suburbs.

My dude, speaking as someone who gets really happy when they find a functor in their code, I fully disagree with your last paragraph. You can do FP without knowing anything about the theory. Telling someone that they should read up on a dry, boring academic topic in order to be a better programmer is kinda a nonstarter. When you start throwing around stuff like "You should learn category theory and homotopy theory to really understand FP" only drives people away - it doesn't inspire curiosity (in most people).

I'm working on an edtech thing - think StackOverflow/Wikipedia for flashcards. Basically, there's a way to remember an exponential amount of information - it just isn't popular because the existing software is terrible. Despite the terrible software, it is very popular among med students, since they have to cram so much info into their heads.

> I also hate that the anki shared decks web site does not encourage collaboration...

Dude, I'm building exactly this. I'm not basing it on git for various reasons, but I am using event sourcing, and git is basically event sourcing for code. My system will (eventually) allow pull requests, comments, upvotes/downvotes, and all kinds of community shenanigans on flash cards. It's months away from release... but here's the repo if you wanna have a look: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Here's another link that I recently saw about something related which is most likely not interesting for you. Just in case: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_web_port_of_anki/ which is about https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

OK, found https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

Creating a Node.js Scraper: Initially, I created a web scraper for my Anki collection using Anki Connect and Node.js. I chose Node.js because I believed that using Rust would require defining every field for the response object(later found out I was wrong). Encountered issues: My program kept crashing due to not specifying the query to be of the same type(as I am writing this I realize I could have just did if(note.field == undefined) continue;) or the TypeScript ?. Resorting to single requests: To resolve the issue, I decided to send one request per card, resulting in processing 50,000 cards, which took 15-30 minutes.

Has anyone used the insertReviews() function before to simulate answering cards programmatically? I’m not able to find much information online regarding it (perhaps because it is relatively new). I am not confident enough in my knowledge of Anki’s review algorithm to attempt replicating its behavior on all 9 of the required inputs for each review (see the 'Manual Analysis' subsection here); wanted to reach out here to see if anyone had experience with the function they would like to share.

I do however create all my decks in Emacs' Org mode using louietan/anki-editor and export to Anki via the plugin FooSoft/anki-connect. This way I never worry about my decks getting corrupted. I actually just have one large deck but anki-editor allows me to separate my deck into separate org files which is convenient.

Another tool I've used if you have the Anki app is the Anki-Connect plugin https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-connect

It supports curl, python, javascript, etc to add cards and supports an incredible amount of actions to interact with Anki.

Example:

Just to add a footnote to the above: I wasn't aware of https://foosoft.net/projects/anki-connect/ so what I'm thinking about is very doable right now, and probably being done.

I've made a small script to make cards with audio. Following the manual at https://foosoft.net/projects/anki-connect/, I have an audio field of:

I dont think there's a public/documented Ankiweb api. You could use AnkiConnect to interface with your locally running instance of Anki: https://foosoft.net/projects/anki-connect/

Read the AnkiConnect documentation. You can interact with AnkiConnect in any language environment you wish. I've mostly - but not exclusively - used Python. It would probably be a very forgiving way to begin.

I write my cards in plaintext (Emacs Org mode via anki-editor) and push them to Anki via anki-connect. The advantages for me are:

create Anki cards with Emac's anki-editor and push them to Anki with anki-connect. There is also a markdown equivalent of anki-editor if you prefer that format plus packages to perform your SRS within Emacs itself such as org-drill, org-fc and pamparam.