Sunday, July 22nd, 2007
I decided to pull the plug on my wiki. I really never got into it past setting it up and making a few configurations. I thought I would let that site sit for a while and age like a fine wine. Well, aparently some religious fellows had a different idea. They would post things to their heart’s content. Since I can’t babysit a site like this and since my interest wasn’t really with it, I said good bye.
If you would like to buy the domain name, I will sell it for $1,000,000 negotiable. If you can’t afford that, just wait a year until it becomes available and you can get it for $8.99 through GoDaddy.
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Friday, June 8th, 2007
Paul sent me an email this morning about the Math Function he added to his Wiki. Here is an entry that shows the result.
Paul did some lengthy and frustrating research trying to get this thing straight. He says, “It is called mimetex, and if you have a shared server, it may be the only way you can use a TeX markup to show your math formulas. Your server needs to be able to run a CGI script, and you need to create a cgi-bin/ director in the root of your webpage. All the installation directions are located here. There is also a wordpress plugin, which is really cool. You can find the user’s manual here.”
Well, thank you Paul. See, I told you he was a good researcher.
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
I came across this very important discovery this morning. I was attempting to edit the “About DotWiki.US” page of my Wiki when I thought a link would be nice.
Wiki syntax, Wikitext language or wiki markup is a bit different than regular HTML. I am not sure why they did it this way…perhaps because the general public is going to be the ones editing Wikis and Wiki syntax is easier and more logical (it seems).
Here is the line I put into the page editor…
DotWiki.US is a personal project aimed at learning how to use and promote a Wiki. DotWiki.US uses the same software as the widely known, [http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia].
Notice at the end of the second sentence, there is a link. Basically, an external link is enclosed in [ ]. The link above is an external link directed at Wikipedia. Inside the square brackets, the first thing you place is the actual URL. Right after that, place a space and then your link title. It’s as easy as that.
Now, for an internal link, it’s a bit different. Take a look at the paragraph in edit mode below…
While in theory any animal might be a pet, in practice only a small number of species of [[mammal|mammals]] (especially [[dog|dogs]] and [[cat|cats]]) and other small animals, such as [[bird|birds]], [[fish]], or [[lizard|lizards]], are practical. One reason for this is that large animals are not able to fit inside small dwellings.
You’ll notice a few different types of links in there. If you want to make an internal link in your Wiki to another page in your Wiki, simply find out the name of the page. Here, we will look at the “fish” link (end of first sentence). The name of the page this person wants to link to is called, “fish.” Therefore, a double [[ ]] is used with the name right in between. That’s pretty straightforward.
Where it gets a little more tricky is when you want an internal link to a page with a different page name than your link title. Lets look at the “mammals” link above (first link). The page name is “mammal” but the link text in the sentence is “mammals.” Basically, to get this result, you need to again use the [[ ]] with the page name you are linking to typed in first, with the link text you want to appear in your paragraph second.
Does that make sense?
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Wednesday, June 6th, 2007
This is a pretty easy one. I have been playing around with my Wiki a bit here and there and have discovered a few things.
One of the most recent is how to create an article, or page (well, that’s what it turns into anyway). Basically, you can either do this as a member of the website or not. Anyone has the ability to create an article. If you register as a member of the Wiki, you have many more options, such as protecting, deleting, moving and watching an article. Also, I think it gives it more authority, but I may be wrong.
The easiest way to create an article is to do a search for the topic on what you want to write about. If a similar article exists, you can edit that one or you can create a new one. If one is not there, you will see a line at the top of the page body that says, “There is no page titled “XXXXXXX”. You can create this page.” Just click the “create this page” link and go to town.
In the white box, place your text and whatever else you want (to be discussed later). Then, at the bottom of the page body, write a short summary of what your article is about. This will help things later on when other people are adding and editing.
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Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
Yeah, this took me a little while to figure out. I started last night and noticed that the clock was ticking rather quickly. I had to move away from the computer…MOVE AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER.
One of the most important things you can do for any website is to create pretty URLs for your pages, or what MediaWiki calls, “Short URLs.” The technique basically turns…
http://www.dotwiki.us/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
into something more like…
http://www.dotwiki.us/wiki/Main_Page
You get the idea of how short urls get rid of all the ugly ?, = and &. URLs like that are hard to remember and search engines just don’t like them. Google recently mentioned that they treat both ugly and pretty URLs the same, but I haven’t found any evidence of that.
So, how to get pretty URLs (or short URLs) in your Wiki? I will tell you that I tried each and every one of MediaWiki’s suggestions and none of them worked for me. It’s strange, because it almost seems like there is no continuity between the developers of this software. There are so many suggestions for so many things. I suppose that might be because of the various server configurations of so many users.
I searched in many web forums out there and came up with a solution that worked for me. I found it here and this is it…
My wiki is installed in /public_html/wiki and the clean url for my main page now comes up as http://www.mysite.com/wiki/Main_Page.
I added the following to .htaccess file located in /public_html.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^wiki/(.+)$ /wiki/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]
I also changed (or added) the following in LocalSettings.php located in /public_html/wiki.
##### ADDED FOR SHORT URLS #####
$wgScript = "$wgScriptPath/index.php";
$wgRedirectScript = "$wgScriptPath/redirect.php";
$wgArticlePath = "$wgScriptPath/$1";
##### ADDED FOR SHORT URLS #####
Thanks to trailville for this one. Just remember, when using this method, be sure to only have one .htaccess file, and keep it located in the root directory.
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Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
After I got the MediaWiki software all installed on the DotWiki.US domain and looking semi-like Wikipedia, my first task was to change the logo in the upper left hand corner.
I didn’t think this was going to be much of a challenge for a seasoned web developer, such as myself. Well, I must say that it took a little time to figure out the system.
Ok, here it is…after you install the Wiki, a file called “LocalSettings.php” is created on the server. You need to download that to your local computer in the proper directory (in this case, the “wiki” directory). You will want to do that to work on it, as well as for backup. MediaWiki has a good line on its configuration page…
This (page) is an index of all supported configuration options based on the DefaultSettings.php file. Never edit DefaultSettings.php; copy appropriate lines to LocalSettings.php instead and amend them as appropriate.
The reason you don’t want to edit DefaultSettings.php is because you will write over all your edits when you upgrade the software. Also, it would be quite amateur to edit such a file when there is another one created just for that purpose that won’t be overwritten. Any variable that you copy and modify from DefaultSettings.php and paste into LocalSettings.php will be given preference in LocalSettings.php, so don’t worry about leaving the variable hanging out there in DefaultSettings.php. Just copy it and ignore it.
So, back to how to change the logo. Well, the MediaWiki instructions say this…
The logo that appears in the top left of each page is determined by the $wgLogo configuration setting in the LocalSettings.php file. To change this you simply need to change the value of $wgLogo to point to the URL of your own logo image. You can upload a file via the wiki and use that address (which allows it to be replaced easily, so you may want to protect the page if you use this method) or use an image uploaded to your server via other means. Caution: It is possible to simply overwrite the default logo installed with MediaWiki, but this is strongly advised against, as an upgrade may end up overwriting it or change the default location of this file. Tip: The logo image should be 135 pixels square.
Here is the first problem for the few of us who may have a hangover from the night before…there is no $wgLogo variable yet in the LocalSettings.php file. You need to go into DefaultSettings.php and find that variable. Then, copy the whole line into a commented area of LocalSettings.php. Also, what exactly are you supposed to change? I knew I was supposed to upload a new image, but where and was I supposed to create a new path? I fiddled with it for a while and came up with this…
### ADDED TO CHANGE WIKI LOGO ###
$wgLogo = "http://www.dotwiki.us/wiki/wiki_logo.png";
### ADDED TO CHANGE WIKI LOGO ###
PS - I changed the actual logo directory above from the real directory.
That’s all there is to it. You need to take out some of the other stuff in the original line and modify it like above. I like to comment to hell out of things like this to keep them very visible.
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Saturday, June 2nd, 2007
The other day, I was cruising about Wikipedia.org. As you may have noticed, that website is growing quite rapidly and I use many references to its various pages in my posts.
Well, I just happened to be at the bottom of one of its pages when I noticed a link to MediaWiki. That’s the free software that Wikipedia uses to drive its site. I had no idea that Wikipedia uses free software as the root of its huge success. Here is what MediaWiki says right on its homepage…
“MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this very website, the home of MediaWiki.”
What is a Wiki? Well, here is some more right from Wikipedia’s website…
A wiki is a website that allows visitors to add, remove and edit content. A collaborative technology for organizing information on Web sites, the first wiki (WikiWikiWeb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the mid-1990s. Wikis allow for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, is one of the best known wikis.
Wikis that are editable by the general public (such as Wikipedia) have been criticized for their reliability: certain individuals may maliciously introduce false or misleading content. Proponents rely on their community of users who can catch malicious content and correct it. Wikis in general make a basic assumption of the goodness of people.
Well, there you have it.
I walked into Paul’s office the other morning and told him what I discovered. I then told him that my brain was dabbling with the idea of installing my own Wiki to see what becomes of it. I thought it would be a worthwhile project. I really had no ideas for what it should turn into. Paul seemed to perk up a bit and liked the idea for himself. I really think it would be great if Paul installed this software for his own Wiki, because he is a good technical investigator. Just as I have the last clump of hair in my hand from frustration, Paul walks in with the answer.
Ok, so with all sorts of interest, I had to quickly think of a domain name…the first one that popped into my head was a sister of the DotUSNetwork.com and is DotWiki.US. Now, I have come to realize that this domain name is going to be problematic. I just got off the phone with my sister, Stephanie and asked her to visit the website. I told her the site is, “dot dot wiki dot us.” You can surely see the trouble with this. Ok, who cares? Not me, it’s just a project.
On to the installation…
Here it is. I installed the Wiki software and learned that it is not as user friendly as many of the scripts that I normally work with are. It forces the user to deal with many php variables, which is fine if you get the general gist of php.
So, what am I going to do with this Wiki? Perhaps, in the beginning, I will just write about my experiences installing and configuring it. Let’s just say that the instructions aren’t that clear…at all.
First tip - Wiki installation. Here is where I got lost. When installing your Wiki, be sure to install it in a sub-directory, not the root directory. I installed mine in the root directory and when I clicked the “Install” link, the page could not be found. I moved all the files to a directory called, “wiki” and everything worked correctly.
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