ADMIN: Wiki Wiki Basics

From: Jimbruce <john.hughes_at_...>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:20:35 -0000


Some brief notes on a *very* helpful new group tool from a one-day veteran. It's fun. It's easy. Its **very** useful.

First up "Wiki Wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian. And quite possibly something completely different in Darktongue.

OVERVIEW OK, go to our Wiki Wiki White Wall at:

http://www.eparsnip.f2s.com/phpwiki/index.php

What you see is a fairly basic web page, with text and links. No surprises so far.

But every sentence on the site can be altered, added to, or commented on. BY YOU. Immediately. Right now. Easily. And you don't need to know any fancy coding. Rather than generate long threads on a mailing list, we can comment directly after the topic suggestions on Wiki Wiki.

Or we can expand categories... and you can see examples of it on the site already. Somebody creates a page and a link (dead easy, I'll come to that soon). Say 'Lunar Troops at the Siege'. On that page, someone else can add subcategories... Darra Happan Sun Warriors, Pelorian Irregulars, Durultz Shock Units... whatever. Later someone else (quite possibly Stu) might want to add the 2nd Quackford Suicide Drakes as an example of Durultz Shock Troops. And then everyone can lend a hand naming the leaders, officers, and cigarbearers.

Get the picture? Begin to see the possibilities?

DOING IT To turn the standard page into an editable document, go to the bottom of the page (any page) and click on

"EditText of this page"

Then text will come up in a window, very similar to the window you type into when you're doing website mail on a Yahoo List. (Like I'm doing now). Go on, try it. There's a Sandbox page just for you to mess around in

http://www.eparsnip.f2s.com/phpwiki/index.php?SandBox

Or on the links from the front page.

The first thing you should do on any page is create a link back to the home page.

There are two ways you can do this.

Type:

Return to FrontPage.

Note that there's no space between the final two words.

Its that simple! Wiki Wiki recognises any word or text string with inner capitals (SandBox, GrandTheoryOfEverything) as a link!

In this case it knows that FrontPage is our well, front page. If you created a new link in this way... say

2ndQuackfordSuicideDrakes

and the page doesn't exist, then when you save, Wiki Wiki creates a link with a question mark after it. Click on that question mark and you're taken to a new, blank page where you can begin to make notes on the brave kamikazes of the Second Quackford.

There's a second, more elegant way of creating links. Anything you put square brackets [] around becomes a link. So you could type

[2nd Quackford Suicide Drakes]

and you'd get a link with spaces between a word. Nick calls these 'Pretty Links'.

Or type

http://www.glorantha.com

and you get a functioning external link to the Glorantha site. For a URL, you don't need brackets - Wiki Wiki will recognise them for you.

SAVING When you've added your text, simply click on the Save button at the top of the screen. You're done, and can see the results instantly. And so can everyone else. Instantly.

Then, if you're like me, you go back and fix your typos...

FORMATTING Most of what you'll be doing on Wiki Wiki is basic typing and using your wetware - commenting on ideas, adding to lists.

There are a few basic formatting tricks you can use.

You get italics by surrounding words with two single quotes on either side:

''Dread secrets''  

You get bold text by using two underscores on either side:

__King Broyan__

And bold italics by using both:

''__Enter, The Bat__''

You get bullets by using an asterisk * at the start of the line, like this:

You can get horizontal rules by typing with four or more dashes like this:


If you have images that are already on the web, you can make them appear on your page by providing the hyperlink in square brackets like this:

[http://www.yourhost.yourdomain/images/picture.png].

Image URLs not in brackets will just appear as hyperlinks to the image.

That's It. Everything I know and a few bits I just learned myself!

It's harder reading this than actually doing it. You can save a page, see any mistakes, and fix it immediately.

Go and have a play!

There are links to help pages at the bottom of your screen.

CONVENTIONS No, not Tentacles. Stuff that's sensible and helps us run things proper.

We've been at this a day, so everyone is still learning. But the following guidelines should help.

  1. Start every page with a link to the front page, or to the next level up, to make navigation easier. Remember how?

Just type:

Return to FrontPage.

or, perhaps

Return to [Lunar Army Types]

2. Please don't delete material: rather, add a comment on the next paragraph. Editors will tidy up down the track. (We haven't got that far yet.)

3. Sign every comment you make! Use triangular brackets:

<John>

Put your signature at the end of your entry.

If there's a running commentary, you can even use opening and closing brackets if you want too, like on a web document

<John>Whose &%#$# idea was it to have duck suicide waders anyway? </John>

4. Keep documents short, and use links. Editing a long document can be a real pain in these web form windows. And two people working on the same document at the same time can mean stuff gets lost.  

5. Keep the editing window open for as short a time as possible. For any entry over a few words, get into the habit of reading a page, typing up your comments in an external editor like Word or Notepad, and then opening the edit window and copying your comments across. The less time you have the editing window open, the less chance there is of two people working on a doc at the same time.

6. If you're doing something substantial to a page, consider putting a quick note at the top of the page and saving. Something like, "John is editing this page right now."

And take it off when you're done.  

That's it! We're all still learning. This day one draft features comments from several users, thanks to Wiki Wiki. I'm sure we'll learn more as we go on. And update this doc.

Thankz again to Tim for making this all happen.

Write! Think! Expand! Have fun!

Cheers

John

Powered by hypermail