A funny thing happened on my way to the wiki…

One of my problems is that I have way too many good ideas, and I try to follow up on too many of them at once. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, necessarily, but I have lots of work to do and I keep getting sidetracked on ways to elaborate on it. It’s a messy process, but it’s mine, and I’m used to it.

I ordered Ward Cunningham’s book, The Wiki Way, from Amazon. Then I was up at the University last weekend and found it at the library there. By the time the Amazon copy arrived I’d read most of the bits from the book that I could really use. It comes with Cunningham’s Quicki Wiki on a disk. The program is written in Perl. I checked my school district server to see if I could use a Perl program and got a ‘permission denied’ message. I talked with the sysop a year ago about CGI scripts on the district servers. He told me that he liked PHP better. That’s how I ended up in Chris Lott’s Programming with PHP and MySQL course last Fall. So I’m not going to ask for permission to install the Perl wiki. Besides, I don’t have time to mess with another language.

The thing that is happening here is that the class weblogs are a lot of fun. And I think that the kids would really like to know how to create hypertext links. I’m not going to let them do that on the WWW because the school district does not allow games and entertainment sites on their equipment. And that’s what the kids mainly know. Instead, I have an idea for using wikis to do group writing projects. And this is where I am tending to get ahead of myself. Neither I nor the kids are ready to jump into that at this time of year.

BUT…The other conclusion I came to is that teacher research would not be a good thing for the Alaska wikicity right now. I want to use it for items of a less -way less- academic nature. Even teachers don’t like to read about research very much. So I figured the audience for that would be nil and might even turn people off. School stuff will interest people, but my classroom research is a bit too personal for an Alaska-oriented site. So I decided to find a wiki that I could use with students and with college professors. Put one in the account I use with the class weblogs and one on northernattitude.org

I began searching for a simple wiki that kids could understand. Some of the reviews I read on the topic questioned whether MediaWiki could even be consdered a wiki. It is a bit complex for kids to use, I think. So I tend to agree. I found a list of wiki engines broken out by programming language. I found another similar list with commentary. According to what I saw there, PhpWiki was very similar to Cunningham’s, so I downloaded it and *attempted* to install it. About a half-dozen times.

I spent a lot of my Saturday re-FTP-ing it to my webhost, copied it to the server in a backup file and went through it in many of its possible configurations. I managed to get the default front page to display, but never had an edit page or any other page make an appearance. So much for PhpWiki. There are other wikis in the sea.

I found what I think is going to be a great wiki for my new purpose last evening after I gave up on PhpWiki. It’s called Wikka Wiki. It’s a very lightweight, customizable PHP-based wiki. It set up fast, though I am still a bit puzzled about how to use mod_rewrite and .htaccess to get the URLs to be a little friendlier. Two very good things about it. The CSS files are easy for me to understand. And it can handle Flash files as well as photo images. They have a demo swf to show how the flash is embedded.

Good news with the Flash because when I started learning about internet publishing technologies 2 years ago, Flash was the first thing I explored. So…I’ve come full circle.

And now I have a new home page for Northern Attitude. It’s not pretty, but I think it might be when I get the time to play with it a bit. I need to add to my to-do list and put a link back to my blog there, too. I don’t know if the wiki is going to stay the homepage, but I’ll leave that way for a while - unless someone lets me know of a good reason I don’t want to do that. I could, instead have a link there from the blog. Don’t know which way makes more sense. I am curious about ways to ward off spambots. Anyone with wiki experience…I’m listening.

The teacher research part of my project - and my other educational tangents will end up there, I think.

UPDATE: I’ve rerouted any traffic to the main NorthernAttitude domain here to my blog and included a link back to the wiki in the header for Borderland. The plan for the main domain is still not completely worked out, but I originally intended it to be a site for kids from northern regions to publish expressive media. I’m beginning to think that another Wikka installation would do the job. That’s a plan for this summer