In the interests of experimenting with a variety of online, collaborative technologies, I installed a very simple wiki. Play around with it, if you like. It’s the simplest one I could find: PhpWiki.
I’m not sure, yet, what use I/we might have for a wiki, but it’s worth experimenting. If you’re unfamiliar with wikis, check out the relevant entry in the Wikipedia. I think I would install MediaWiki if I had a specific project in mind because it seems to provide more controls over editing.
Here is a question asked in the face of way too many Google hits: if I want to create an online, collaboratively built, bibliographic database (mySQL and PHP), do I have to come up with the schema myself, or are there something like “plug-and-play” templates out there much in the way that there are for CSS and HTML?
Via Many-to-Many: “Using Wikis for content management….” Here, Tom Coates addresses what has been one of my reservations about wikis, the somewhat awkward resulting appearance and navigational elements: “the particularly networked rather than heirarchical model of navigation that they lend themselves towards isn’t suitable for all kinds of public-facing sites (the same could be said of the one-size-fits-all design of the pages).” Coates asks us to
imagine for a moment that the Wiki page itself is nothing but a content management interface and that the Wiki has a separate templating and publishing engine that grabs what you’ve written on the page, turns it into a nicely designed fully-functioning (uneditable) web-page and publishes it to the world. It could make the creation of small information rich sites enormously quick – particularly if you built in FTP stuff.
Indeed. Make it so.
Admiring the new color scheme over at WeezBlog and working on setting up course blogs for next semester (with frequent stupid questions sent Liz Lawley‘s way), I’m remembering that back in the days of the browser-safe color palette, Lynda Weinman had a book called Coloring Web Graphics that included page after glossy page of sample website designs with color codes for the creatively lazy. If you liked a particular design, it was easy to just adopt the colors for your own purposes.
Does anything like that exist out on the web? (He asked without bothering to google first.)
Obviously I’m still trying some things with the style sheet. Bear with me.