Finally after waiting for over two weeks I have my net connection back. We just moved home again and it seems we are too far from the exchange this time to get a 2Mbps connection so we’ve settled for 1Mbps. It’s not too bad I suppose at least it’s not dial-up.
With the bank holiday coming up I hope we do something interesting like our trip to Oxford last time. That was a good day out and perhaps we should do a more scenic day trip like the Cottswolds.
Wikis
I’ve been experimenting with wikis as a documentation tool. The collaborative editing facilities that wikis provide are invaluable when writing documentation or doing analysis / design / requirements work. After I first installed it, I was completely confused about how to use it. This was because I was expecting it to be similar to many web-based content management systems where you create a page for a topic and start writing on it with relevant links added to the body of the text. In this wiki, however, I couldn’t find any way to create a new page on a topic! I was dumbfounded until I read some documentation and realized that you could just create any page you like by simply typing in a link to a page that doesn’t exist and then editing it to add your content!
I’m using MediaWiki at the moment which is the same wiki that the famous WikiPedia project uses. If you haven’t checked out Wikipedia yet, I strongly recommend it. It is fast becoming my choice for looking up information on almost all topics; it’s far better than Google in many cases where you are looking for historical-type information, for example Television.
I came across another really interesting wiki project today called wikiwyg. The idea is that you double click on any of the entries and the entry changes to a full text area complete with a toolbar and formatting options. You can Cancel or Save your changes right there and then. You need Firefox to make it work, though. It’s another example of how everyone is trying to find more and more interesting ways to make the web more interactive and user-friendly, in the spirit of GMail and Google Maps
Actually, Wikiwyg works with IE and Firefox. True, IE ain’t quite a browser, but I fathom those two cover everyone but me (the lone Konqueror/Safari user). Ingy is, I know that, working on Safari compatibility as well, we’ll see a Safari compliant version relatively soon, I am sure.