Borderland

I think commitment is a mark of character and the prerequisite of success with any meaningul goal, and I would just like to give one more nod to the developers of Wikka Wiki for taking an active interest in my satisfaction with their product. Wikka Wiki has my vote for “wiki engine of the year.” It is truly The Little Wiki That Could. A powerful little tool that comes with a full set of features and a development team that is working hard to make it even more powerful and easy to use.

JavaWoman offered to help me with my mod_rewrite trouble, and she will probably hear from me on IRC #wikka channel on freenode (Thanks, Chris, for showing me how it works) in the near future because nothing I try with .htaccess seems to help generate the friendly URLs that I would like. It’s not a big problem, but it doesn’t seem like it should be hard to fix, either. I made a user page at the Wikka development site to help me learn more about how the software works. I find their site to be informative and welcoming. In addition to JavaWoman’s comments, I got a message from someone with a colleague in New Brunswick who is setting up a site for teachers similar to mine. A most excellent welcome, I’d say. I think if I spend some time digging aound on the Wikka site I may even build on my scant knowledge of PHP and learn to do a few more things.

Wikka Wiki seems to be the perfect solution for what I need to do. It

• has an RSS capability which allowed me to display my delicious links to Wikka’s relevant support pages and create a custom support page;
• allows users to lock down any pages that they create, limiting read, write, and comment privileges – which may appeal to people doing educational research for a variety of reasons;
• presents a very simple interface and allows for categorization of content, making it easy to search; displays images, flash files, and also supportsFreeMind mind mapping software.

There’s more, too. Take a look at the full feature list.

I made a couple of changes to the TrueNorth site. One of the things I did was to reinstall the software on a new subdomain that has a name that is more descriptive than “wiki.” I left a header redirect in the wiki directory pointing to the new subdomain so my few remaining stray links will still work. It was really no big deal to copy and paste the dozen pages I’d made into the new location. It was not an elegant way to do it from a programmers perspective, but I’m not a programmer, and I’m not elegant.

The reason I could get away with moving the site to a new domain like that is that the only other person who’d been into the site hadn’t done anything with it yet. That’s going to change this summer. Joan asked me to teach a group of teachers in the Alaska State Reading Endorsement Program how to use the wiki for a project they will be doing. My other good idea for the wiki as a research tool is to create bibliography pages. Researchers who plan to publish have to keep track of their sources, and the ease of linking and annotating references would make writing research reports much easier than a pile of note cards or a directory on a computer hard drive.

I wish I wasn’t so busy with my own job. I’d have a lot more time to mess with this stuff. There’s a pile of papers on my desk to wade through because I’ve been sitting here after school all afternoon typing. I’ve been too busy to even log my activity.