path: home / archives / 2003 / 09 / 18 / wikiwikiweb
Who ever said, "Great minds think alike." was definitely not wrong. Who would have thought that on exactly the same day as Matt Haughey, I would also be experimenting with creating a fully functional web site based on a Wiki underlay? We even chose the same base Wiki software to fiddle with; spooky. For those of you that don't know what a Wiki is, I'll explain, for those that do sit tight I'll only be a minute. First and foremost, a Wiki is a web site that is editable by anyone. It usually has an edit button at the bottom of every page allowing any old person to come in and edit the contents of a page. This was originally to allow for a collaborative web site, one that could be improved on and added to by anyone. "What about the destructive people?", you ask "Don't they just destroy the site?". Well that's a good question. Basically the Wiki software archives the old copies of the page so if some vandal does come along and ruin the site, the Wiki administrator can just roll the page back to the last good edit. Wiki's also have a whole load of other built in features like text to (valid) (X)HTML converters, thus allowing people with little or no HTML knowledge to be able to write and maintain their very own Wiki web site. Until recently, the only Wiki's I knew of were the CSS-Discuss Wiki and the Atom Wiki, both resource type web sites. Why hadn't people tried to make actual web sites out of a Wiki before now? (Correct me if I'm wrong). The "Wiki-web" idea works so well for personal web sites as someone who doesn't know any form of HTML, let alone can write valid, semantic code can maintain their site -- you think it would have been a natural decision for loads of people to make Wiki web sites. As I have said before, Wiki's can be edited by anyone, so obviously this wasn't that practical for a non-collaborative web site. A few hours hacking around the phpWiki script and I had changed it so you must be the Wiki admin before you could edit any of the pages. A few more tweaks of the templates within phpWiki and it was all set. Anyway, without further ado; I present my first "Wiki-site" -- CapViolin, a small personal web site for a family friend. As always, comments are appreciated.
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