Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with wiki

The FibuLA is LAteral

devnull — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:09:56 -0800

Is there a general mnemonics database somewhere? Coming up with a good mnemonic is a lot of work, and some are just terrible (e.g. "rese nese mr mn" for German)

I came across the Medical Menemonics website today while searching for an answer to my question. It's great - the mnemonics seem high quality but there's one problem: I'm not a medical student, I want something more general.

Does anyone know of a general purpose mnemonics database?

Also, what strategies do you find useful for memorising sets of similar words which are not verbs or nouns? (der die das, den die das... etc as an example)

Recommendations for good private wiki platform?

Jacqueline — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 04:23:49 -0800

Please help me pick a wiki that isn’t icky. I need help finding a good private wiki platform for my organization (of ~500 people), to be used as a combination intranet / internal collaboration / knowledge management tool.

My 6-person team has been using ClearWiki and we love it. Unfortunately, (for legal reasons I won’t go into) before we can expand wiki use to our entire organization we need a wiki that can be hosted on our own server, on our own intranet, behind our firewall, but ClearWiki is only available as Software-as-a-Service. (I already asked ClearWiki if there was any way for us to buy a copy to host ourselves and they said no.)

So I need help finding something similar to ClearWiki that we can install on our own server.

Must-have features:
- Our webmaster says that it must run on PHP and PostgreSQL (first choice) or mySQL (second choice)
- WYSIWYG editor (instead of any sort of markup language/coding)
- Access control to individual pages can be set by user or groups of users
- Pages can accept file attachments
- Users can subscribe to individual pages to be notified of changes to those pages (preferably by email)
- Standard wiki revision history capability (records of who changed what when, ability to revert changes)
- Very very very user-friendly with a simple, clean interface (most of my coworkers are not very tech-savvy)

Nice-to-have features:
- Can organize pages with both folders and tags/labels
- Task management / to do lists
- Calendars (or ability to embed Google Calendars)
- Spreadsheets that are sortable and filterable (or ability to embed Google Spreadsheets)
- Wiki account is integrated with network account (so if someone is already logged into our network, they are also already logged in to their wiki account)

We have already considered/tested and rejected TikiWiki, BusinessWiki, and MediaWiki for being too complex/difficult for most people in our organization. There have been some discussions of getting SharePoint someday, but it won’t happen any time soon (if ever).

My own personal wiki knowledge/experience is only as a user – I’ve never installed a wiki platform before – so please forgive me if I’ve left out any important technical details. I’ll keep an eye on this thread throughout the day and answer any follow-up questions you may have.

Thanks!

Help me get my stuff back!

gakiko — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:07:56 -0800

I used Infogami.com for some of my personal research. Now it's shut down and I want my research back, but I can't get to it. Infogami used to be a simple wiki/personal page host with some features I liked (eg. Markdown instead of HTML). Now they've shut it down (without any kind of notice, if I may add), I can't get to my pages anymore and emailing them at the address provided (feedback/at/infogami.com) gives me the following daemon error:
Sorry,_I_wasn't_able_to_establish_an_SMTP_connection._(#4.4.1)/
I'm_not_going_to_try_again;_this_message_has_been_in_the_queue_too_long./

My site was password-protected so the content doesn't show up in Google Cache. Or in Google at all (I guess I checked the option for the site not to be indexed).

Does anyone have any ideas how I can contact them or get back my research? Do you know who the owners are and how to reach them? Is there some hack I could use to see my stuff?

Why Should You Use Social Networking at Work?

Jaybo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:06:47 -0800

Many workplaces ban social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and so on. What are some of the reasons workplaces should allow (and even encourage) staff to use social networking sites? I'm particularly interested in the case you would make to someone in the healthcare field but examples that are applicable to other areas, especially those that may ban social networking site for privacy or productivity reasons, are welcome as well.

Make Wiki do Retail

webhund — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:41:31 -0800

How could a wiki be used by a small retail business selling tangible products? I'm looking for ways to use a wiki in a small retail business to better serve its customers. Looking through example sites of various wiki-species (mediawiki, dokuwiki, etc...) leads to a dry hole of wiki usage in the retail sector.

The only authorized wiki authors/editors would be the shop owner and her staff, with editing locked down to the general internet public. The business sells high-end food ingredients to a niche culinary market, both online and at a brick/mortar store. Principal customers are restaurant chefs and home cooks/foodies.

The business uses its blog for "what's happening/good now" type of stuff and then has static product pages on its site where the details of each product are explained, all linked to the online store. Where does (or does not) a wiki fit in this?

Are there things that a locked-down, but publicly-visible wiki could do that a blog or other non-wiki CMS could not in this application? The business owner is technologically adept, is an active blogger, and is looking for new ways to use technology in a traditional retail setting.

Building a wiki

nushustu — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:55:57 -0800

Is there software out there that would make it easy to create a secure, local-only wiki? I need to build a wiki for work. It has to be hosted on our local network, with absolutely no access from outside. I'm no code monkey, and need to get this up and running relatively quickly. I've found lots of software that will create wiki templates, but they all appear to be hosted by the company that created the templates. Is there any software out there that will allow me to download everything I need and host it all locally?

Free or cheap CRM / PIM / wiki that imports and exports vCards with pictures? Suitable for film production?

Josh Coe — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:47:28 -0800

Is there a free or cheap shared PIM that imports and exports vCards with pictures? Preferably something suitable for film production? I need a PIM-sort-of-software for my web-based team to keep track of a database of actors. Additional functionality would be nice such as keeping track of projects (I've been looking at something like Chandler as a group task organizer, but an all-in-one option would be nice) and managing email campaigns (via a less complex clone of SugarCRM perhaps), but the necessity is the actor database.

I found Smibs Doorbell. It seemed perfect. I like the way it's organized by Contacts, Tasks, Groups, and Opportunities, but it exports vCards without pictures, which would be a dealbreaker if we outgrew it.

I'm a graduate student, so $20 per month is way out of my price range. $5 would be possible; free is better.

I wouldn't mind a hack-like solution. I even tried Google Apps. I thought we could manage email campaigns via Google Docs, and maintain the actor database in Google Spreadsheets, but the pictures don't go inside a spreadsheet cell but rather hover above the entire document.

I thought about using Wordpress. I tried Chris Wallace's Gallery Pro theme, but the functionality wasn't quite what I was looking for. Now I'm looking at WP-CRM or Celtx as possibilities. A wiki like Pimki seems intriguing but I haven't wrapped my head around whether that would meet my needs yet.

I'm using Mac OSX Leopard with WinXP Parallels, and my admin has a PC. I have Mediatemple hosting, so I could host it there. The company would manage multiple film projects at once.

Any suggestions on what CRM / PIM / wiki platform we should use?

Find A Website: Funny Community Wiki Site w/ Case Studies of Fictional Occult Objects

sixswitch — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:09:10 -0800

The titles for the show "Hotbox" remind me of a wiki-based community site I saw a while ago. Every article on the site is a dry, passive-voice case study of some (usually hilariously dangerous) fictional occult object or person, and the site itself is allegedly run by some giant MIB-style organization. The site has very specific acronyms and vocabulary, and I can't remember any of it except that agents are called agents and there's a running joke about appropriate euphemisms for when they're killed. I can't remember much more except that all the objects are numbered from 001 up. Help!

How to add languages to a MediaWiki?

mateuslee — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 01:05:39 -0800

Is there an online idiot's guide to adding another language to a MediaWiki? I am a total newbie who, with the help of a tech savy friend, got a small wiki up and running. I am using it to describe some under-documented indigenous language which I am researching as part of my dissertation, and it is quickly growing. For now it is in English, but eventually I would like to grow it to be in Spanish, Portuguese, and even the native language itself.

I checked out a bunch of links online and I see they are instructions, but they seem especially complicated, and involve a lot of stuff I don't understand.

Does anyone know of instructions with a simple step-by-step process detailing how to do this? I feel over my head...

Thanks a lot!

Looking for a wiki-database hybrid

raamenchan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:27:46 -0800

I'm looking for a wiki-database hybrid that I can self host. I want the wiki part so I can create a personal database of ideas and resources for myself (recipes, travel notes, lists, etc).

But I also would like a database aspect to it because I would like to use that same wiki for contacts management as well. And while I can do it with a wiki, it would be much better if it had fields to make the contacts more searchable, as well as has the ability to export information (probably as CSVs) for email programs.

With the hybrid, I could also set up a sort of CRM system for my personal business as well due the to flexibility.

I actually found something that matches what I'm looking for: wikidBASE, but it runs on Django and my web host doesn't support it.

So I was wondering if there were any alternatives. I'm also not hot on the appearance of wikidBASE, but I can live with it as long as I have the function... which I currently don't even have =/

(I currently also have very little knowledge on what things like Django, and the platform Python that it runs on, actually are.)

If any of you are familiar with David Allen's GTD, this is sort of like an online extension of the General Reference system that he employs.

WikiMedia Question

mateuslee — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:41:43 -0800

Any advice on getting a wiki off the ground? I'm working with a small group of language documentarians. Mainly we work strictly with linguistics, but of course there's plenty of overlap with anthropology, archaeology, and all sorts of other interesting sub-disciplines. A lot of this "peripheral material" is not suitable for academic publications, but is nonetheless very interesting.

I had the idea of making a Wiki of endangered or under-documented languages. After all, I can write in the Wiki markup language and think the format is ideal. I could involve my colleagues and even, perhaps, the members of some of those communities themselves.

Of course MediaWiki is the best, but the problem is server space. The university is not so enthusiastic and I am not really interested in paying a monthly fee to keep this going. I know there are a bunch of online options, many of which are really cool (Google Sites, and a variety of 'Wikifarms', but they never compete with the simplicity and ease of MediaWiki.

So, my question: Do you know of any online Wiki which has an identical look/feel to MediaWiki? And/or: Do you know of anywhere I could get free hosting for a MediaWiki like the one I have in mind? I know that probably sounds like a pipe dream do you experts...

Thanks, guys.

Wiki in a WordPress advice

mateuslee — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:34:14 -0800

How can I get my website a wiki? Sorry if this comes across as a bit ignorant, but I'm not so technical...

I have a simple WordPress website which relates to my work documenting endangered languages in the Peruvian highlands.

Until now the few pages and the blog have served their purpose, but as I sort through the tons of information while I compile my dissertation, I find all kinds of interesting tidbits: photos, observations, stories, jokes, songs, etc. I tag and organize all this stuff in Evernote for my own reference, but it occurs to me that it'd be cool to have a small wiki which functions not only to categorize linguistic observations (eg an organized morphemic analysis) but also cultural ones. It could even be multilingual so Spanish/Portuguese readers could participate too. I'd include this in Wikipedia itself, but some of the information is so precise and exact that I think it'd get lost in Wikipedia (for example, I'd have an entry on the suffix -RAS which denotes the emphatic affirmative, I'd give some example sentences and maybe link it to some audio of songs in which it appears, those songs would be referenced to the occasion on which they are sung with photos, etc).

The big idea is that the community members themselves, when they visit the nearest larger village with internet, could learn how to input data and could grow the site. I think it'd be a cool idea that could play a role in efforts to help these people valorize their own culture and language.

I know how to write Wikis and all that, but am not sure how I could get one into (or linked to) my WordPress site.

I see there is a plugin for WordPress, but I confess I'm completely at loss with this. I think it'd turn my entire site into a Wiki which is not what I'm looking for...

Can anyone give me some advice on this? I will shamelessly promote you in the wiki once it exists.

Thanks a lot!

Help me learn to template MediaWiki

arniec — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:44:07 -0800

I am trying to find concise, direct instructions on how to create templates (not skins, templates) for MediaWiki and I'm coming up short. While Google has tons of hits, many incorrectly identify skins as templates, and the rest spread the information out through so many other topics that it is simply frustrating. Is there a resource out there that will help me develop MediaWiki page templates in a step-by-step fashion?

She got her data in my pbwiki; help us get it out!

dirtypants — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 16:02:38 -0800

How can I migrate away from pbwiki before they do their "upgrade" in March? I tried to come up with a cute title. I hope people get it.

A colleague of mine has a very large (hundreds of pages) wiki using pbwiki. It is niche-academic-related and really the only source for this information on the web. It is so comprehensive it is bewildering. She just got so sick of those of us in the field who should have been disseminating this information *not* doing it that she did it herself, and it has become a tremendous resource. Unfortunately I have no familiarity with the platform.

I can't figure out pbwiki is flat file or db driven, but it seems that it has a proprietary db backend that they won't let us access (they do offer an API that would let you pull from your own MySQL db, but I digress).

Ideally, we'd suck down all of her information and dump it into something like MediaWiki or one of the MySQL based GNU/GPL options that we would "own" so that we wouldn't be subject to the whims of a company that decides to "upgrade" or price her out of a very expansive Wiki.

Anyone have any ideas? I know a bit about this stuff, but I'm in way over my head. And I've Googled the heck out of pbwiki, and I can't seem to figure out much of anything, other than the fact that there are a lot of questions asking how to migrate away that have been left open on forums (no answers).

MediaWiki would be my choice because I could do a scripted install that would take me about five minutes. I'd be willing to entertain other Apache / MySQL GNU/GPL options.

Thanks!

Display permissions for a wiki--how specific can you get?

elfgirl — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:12:16 -0800

An organizationally obsessed GM wants to create a wiki-like site to house information on his created world. Challenge: he also wants a way to limit what information users can see on a given page, on a user by user basis. My husband, after watching his gamers furiously trying to take notes and constantly ask "what do I know about [blah]", decided that it would be much easier if he could just put all the information about his game world up online somewhere. The most logical format would seem to be a wiki.

His big requirement is that the wiki or CMS app he uses have the ability to decide who can see certain things. Not just certain pages, but even sections of text on certain pages.

For example, if user A goes to the page on ents he sees,

"Ents are large trees that happen to move around and talk. Freaky, no?"

But if user B goes to the page on ents he sees,

"Ents are large trees that happen to move around and talk. Freaky, no? Oh, and by the way, the party met one on day 135 and you had tea together."

Are there any wiki or CMS apps out there that have this type of granularity to their permissions?

So, I want a wiki? Or... something else? What. What do I want?

Mrs Hilksom — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 17:33:40 -0800

I am managing research on a book. The author and I live 2800km apart and I think I want to work through a wiki. As I gather data and articles and she writes her chapters, I want all our source material and links to be building momentum, stored in one hooded online space. So I THINK that what I want is a wiki to share/organize research for the book. Do I? I don't have the vernacular to properly/accurately describe what I want, so I'll just explain it in my own words and hopefully it's vaguely clear...

Author knows zip about technology. I know zip + 1 about technology. But I like to push myself a bit further and learn something new with each project, and since the beginning of this one my brain has returned again and again to the idea of a wiki, based on what I know of what wikis do. Perhaps I don't want a wiki, but I need to be told that based on the description of what I DO want. I'm a little too stupid and old and lacking a network of people IRL of whom I can ask, "Is a wiki what I want?" to get more than confused stares.

So: I want to create a closed online space to organize my research for, and share my research with, the author & her editors at Impressive International Publishing House. I want to restrict visibility of the page(s) and research to the two of us for the first many months of the research, so we can work privately. (Draft text will be posted for our mutual reference & editing, and we can't allow book content to leak online.)

I would very much like to avoid building the research in Word and sending new versions to the author every two hours on work days as I touch-touch-touch the content. An elegant solution would be far more my preference, and it will help me continue to impress the nice people at Impressive International Publishing House who already think I am pretty damn great after my previous book project with them. I have to put in the time and actually do the fabulous research (a given), but managing to also amaze them with the appearance, clarity & organization of the results online/through technology is within reach, particularly if I put it all in accessible online form, as I do in my vision of the wiki. I think.

For the building of this wiki, I have no html skillz other than this , so I need a wysiwyg editor. I definitely need to be able to include links which will bounce a user out to the web to view a page online. I would like to be able to upload pdfs and images. Something really easy to be marginally customizeable in terms of general look would be great, but not necessary. I also want:
* a sidebar wherein you can quickly navigate to research for each specific chapter, essentially a table of contents
* chapter research pages would be clearing house spaces for the information, links, and analysis I assemble, including links to online articles, downloadable pdfs of newspaper and magazine articles, images, ISBN lists of books, and text wherein I will summarize and make comments about slant of research, talk about the direction of sleuthing, poke fun at people's spelling ability and hair, etc.
* costs would hopefully not include people, unless they were one-time-fee-setup people. I should be able to figure everything out myself in the model I seek, or be able to pay someone a set-up fee where they put it together and I never have to speak to them again (or, in theory, they actually answer their telephone/emails after the first week and do the damn work I need, when I need it).
* costs should not include a monthly fee to keep stuff online.

Initially I thought I'd found what I wanted in Google Sites but somehow can't create the links I want (despite using the "links" clicker-oo on the editing bar for about a dozen links before I realized it was sending me right back to the wiki main page when "saved"), which makes me question my understanding of what I was creating in the first place and its probable usability for my project.

I went through all the examples and templates on Google Sites and Apps today and didn't find any that included links to outside pages, so perhaps this isn't supported. It was the first thing I wanted to be able to do, though, so I found this surprising. But I don't work inside a corporate environment and am not hip to the way things are shared these days, so maybe there's a way around this that my pea-brain doesn't recognize in the templates and examples. What could it be? I don't want to get any further on this nascent Google Sites page and realize I have built a useless monument to Lack Of Preparation.

So, AskMe people, I'm looking for your social networkian and technological expertise. Me = currently dumb, and me = glazy-in-the-eyes when it comes to certain kinds of programming ideas. But, me also = hardworking and definitely wanting to kick out the jams on this contract (am certainly not doing it for the money).

My basic question is this: in your opinion, what should I be using (online program, software, architecture, what)? Do I think a wiki is a good idea but really I just don't know about this perfect, other, industry-wide-solution-called-X? If something other than a wiki (another term for a similar idea, another program, something else) would work for me, I'm open to suggestions.

If a wiki is what I want, which online wiki type/service/program is appropriate, given what I need?

Adding stars to wikis?

underthehat — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:24:02 -0800

How can I add star ratings to content pages in a free wiki like PBWiki or Wetpaint? I'm trying to create a site that collects and rates places to go sledding in Massachusetts. I'd like to use a wiki so that many people can contribute content. I'd also like users to rate sledding spots (maybe even rate in several categories such as ease of access or steepness of hill). If you know of a wiki site that has this feature, or if you have another idea about how to make a site like this, speak up!

I've looked at Blogger and Wordpress for this idea too. Both have star rating widgets, but the widgets just rate the post, which isn't quite what I'm looking for. Blog sites also have stricter permissions, and I'm hoping to create a site where it will be easy for many people to add sledding spots.

I've checked out Pligg, which looks promising, but I'd rather not have to deal with hosting, especially since it costs money.

Which Wiki Would Work?

arniec — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:01:07 -0800

I want to start a wiki. Help me decide how best to go about it with long-term planning and goals in mind. I have an idea for a Wiki that has not yet been created (is it possible?? Yes it is...). It is related to a topic where I already have a web presence with over 100k unique visitors per month to my domain so I believe I have a core base of people who will jump into this Wiki and help make it a success.

The end goal for the Wiki would be something that would have over 100,000 articles, and likely be somewhat picture heavy with between 1 and 50 pictures per article.

But to start, I cannot decide between using my current webhosting situation using a MediaWiki install or using wikia.com to set up the site.

Currently I own several of my own domains, and I have them hosted with Dreamhost (which has given me some fits in the past but {knock on wood} has been great of late). I have their "unlimited" storage and bandwidth option.

My vision is fast initial growth eventually tapering off to regular updates, and huge growth over time.

By the same token, I would like to be able to do affiliate links (Amazon, etc.) and try to get some advertising revenue for my work if it does take off, and I also want to leverage the internet presence I have currently, my "brand" if you will.

So does anyone have experience with Media Wiki or Wikia? Any preference between them? If I start with one and need to transition to another, is that do-able? How much work involved, etc.

Thanks!

Linux software for an electronic journal

PercussivePaul — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 15:38:54 -0800

What are some good Linux programs for keeping an electronic research journal? I write a lot when I am thinking about a problem. Writing helps me organize my thoughts. Now that I'm starting a PhD I want to move away from the pen-and-paper method I used in my master's, mainly because organization and information retrieval became very difficult after a year or two.

I'm using Ubuntu Linux (though I could try Windows programs under WINE, I guess). I tried a few programs so far, recently TomBoy, but I wasn't sold on it. I don't like the TomBoy interface where little notes fly up in new windows; I'd prefer something closer to a tabbed text-editor with indexing and timestamps. My style is not so much creating structured information like a database or wiki, but rather dumping bursts of text into the screen every now and then. I don't want to spend a lot of time thinking about organizing information; instead, I want to able to open the program, start typing, and then click somewhere to have it filed away. Any ideas?

What's the best way to build a user-modifiable website?

JZig — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:26:23 -0800

What is the best way to build a user-modifiable website these days? I want to make a website organized around a certain theme (the DRM associated with given PC games), and would like to set it up so users can easily add or modify information about specific games. I haven't tried to build a website in about 5 years, and I know things have changed a bit since then. I have the vague idea that it would make sense to build on top of an existing system, like MediaWiki or whatever. I have access to linux-based (VM with full access) hosting, and I don't intend to make a particularly huge website, just one that fulfills the specific goal of answering "Does this game have DRM?". Also, it would be nice to be able to compile the metadata into reports (like all games with Securom).

Anyone have suggestions for building this kind of website?

Wikify my math

escabeche — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 19:22:29 -0800

Should I be using a wiki to collect my notes on mathematical research? Which one? I am a mathematician and I generate a lot of notes, thoughts, and computations. For many years, my method of gathering these was to write everything down under dated headings in a series of spiral notebooks, then index each notebook as it was finished. Drawback: my handwriting is really hard to read after a couple of years, and I often found it easier to work out something again from scratch than to try to follow the reasoning in my scribbled notes. Besides, since I work on a lot of projects at once, the notes relevant to project X might be scattered over various notebooks in hard-to-find ways.

For the last year or so, I've been LaTeXing short notes on various subjects; having a nice clean document makes it much easier to keep track of what I was trying to say, but now I have tons of .tex and .pdf documents on my hard drive and in order to find the one I want I often have to remember the filename -- or I just forget the document exists altogether.

It occured to me that the correct platform for what I really want to do might be some kind of a wiki, where the notes, .pdfs, links, etc. associated with a given project will stay "in one place," where I can easily link to or even include outside documents, and most importantly where I can easily locate all notes relevant to a given question.

Are any of you mathematicians or mathematical scientists who use a wiki in this way? Am I right to think this might be useful? And if so, which of the many options should I be thinking about? I'm a bit confused with Google Sites, PBWiki, Tiddlywiki, VoodooPad, instiki, and more all floating around offering what looks like substantially similar functions. Or should I just learn how to use Zotero or Google Desktop or Papers and tag the hell out of all my floating .pdfs?

Things I care about:

* Must be easy, really easy, to set up on a Mac. (i.e. presume I don't know how to use Linux.)
* The search functionality should be really good.
* Should be able to export well, since I'm not at my computer all the time and I do want to have easy access to printouts.
* (related to above) should be in a sufficiently stable format, or be sufficiently exportable, that I don't have to worry about a company going under and my notes being inaccessible; this is stuff I want to be sure I have access to years in the future.

Things I don't care about:

* Good TeX formatting; I don't mind writing notes "e-mail style" without the symbols.
* Whether it's hosted or sits on my hard drive -- though ideal, I think, would be something that was hosted but mirrored itself on my laptop so that I could work on it off-line.
* Privacy -- i.e. the thought of Google or whoever else having this data stored on their servers doesn't trouble me.

This old thread has some good suggestions, but it's two and a half years old and the criteria are somewhat different.

What IRC bot do developers use?

butterstick — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:26:23 -0800

What is a good IRC bot to run on an internal IRC server used by programmers in a software development company? I've been in a number of IRC channels for open source projects where the IRC bot provides some really neat functionality. I'd like it to integrate with our CVS system, and possibly our bug tracking (JIRA) platform. An ability to index our Wiki would be pretty rad as well.

What is the current state of IRC based integration with software management systems?

Yes book does mean TeX

jeffburdges — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:34:13 -0800

How should one present books online? I'd say the main constraint is that the original source are latex & tex expressing mathematics and using hyperref for hyperlinks. So we've easily got the whole book available in one pdf as also as separate pdfs for each chapter, which requires modifying hyperref or editing the embedded links. But what about lower bandwidth options?

Are there any open source web app that downloads pages when needed ala books.google.com? Can any browsers render pdfs inside the page? Or must all such apps use images?

PDFtoHTML can produce beautiful output, but doesn't support pdf's produced from LaTeX. Any idea if this can be fixed easily?

DVI2html merely produces images files for each page. LaTeX2html seems sublimely ridiculous (for example, theorem environments are converted to images). HyperLaTeX seems workable for minor projects, but too restrictive for books. TTH seems like the best converter by far, even producing MathML, but their pages often require reconfiguration of the browser. Btw, I've noticed that wikipedia doesn't use MathML directly themselves, but typesets the equations using amstex.

Can one produce html output any more easily from ConTeXt?

Tools for a simple staff directory on PBwiki

lillygog — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:53:18 -0800

I need to transform a big HTML table into something easier to update and maintain. Bonus: I'd like to put it (or its display widget) onto our staff wiki page. I've got a staff wiki and would like to put our staff directory up on the wiki. We're using free PBwiki hosting, since that's our best option for web space right now. Unfortunately, any sort of database-driven solutions requiring actual web coding are beyond us -- I fiddled with style sheets years ago and understand some things in a conceptual sense, but am not a web developer. So think easy, painless web tools that would be easy for a small, non-technical shop to maintain, and easy for staff without HTML knowledge to update.

The staff directory is currently a gigantic (over 175 entries) HTML table. Yay. Simply pasting the HTML into the wiki doesn't work because editing those giant tables is notoriously difficult, and I'd like to make this as easy for staff as possible. I'm not entirely a fan of wiki table formatting, either, because I feel like you're still sticking your data into a hard-to-update, un-transformable format.

So I decided that a spreadsheet would be easiest, based largely on Google Docs' ability to embed in web pages and export to .xls, .cvs, .html, .pdf, and so on. Plus everyone's familiar with Excel, and you can change rows and columns all you want. However, some don't want to use Google Docs because that requires setting up yet another account and password -- a legitimate concern.

Is there something I'm missing? Have you heard of any other web tools, shortcuts, simpler ways to do this? I guess what I'm trying to do is create a PBwiki table without being stuck in table formatting, if that even makes sense.

Help me find a suitable wiki

adamvasco — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 02:50:29 -0800

I need a basic private wiki for only a few (presently 2; max 5) users. These users need editing rights and live in very different time zones. This is to be an information database for non technical people. Not looking to publish anything just information sharing. What I need is something like a shareable wikipad. Wiki should be exportable should this project trade up. It will preferably be hosted on a private domain with ftp access for editing and have password for viewing access. No bells and whistles needed.