Summer job hunt, HongPong.com gets tiki in the wiki

This week i have to try to find another job since I can't get enough hours randomly making websites to get by. There are some leads out there, but who knows? At least there's finally been a bump in the number of jobs available around here.

The new server I've dubbed tarfin, after a character I made up in an old story, is kind of a pokey beast, again an old Compaq PII/266. I am not sure if it is suitable for advanced php or Perl projects. Someone told me that 266s like these are sold for around $35, so that's the kind of power we're talking about. But there is a possibility of getting a better one, if I can find another job.

The Linux project has borne some results and led to new internet possibilities. In the software packages that Gentoo's software manager, portage, makes available, I found TikiWiki, a fairly advanced web system that would let me run multiple blogs, forums, a good links directory, and the all-important (and thus far very lacking) image galleries. However, the TikiWiki system is really oriented around Wikis, which are like a sort of digital whiteboard, with their own syntax that's much easier than HTML. "Wikiwiki" is the word for fast in Hawaiian, and wikis facilitate the rapid, collective collection and organization of information, including tables, hyperlinks, and pictures, in a very public and revolutionary way.

As a test, I installed in on the desktop computer, and you can interact with the test installation at http://tiki.hongpong.com . (Incidentally this whole thing showed me how to set up subdomains at the flick of a config file under hongpong.com... there's a lot that could be done with that.) I have set it up so that people don't even have to give it their real email address. Just register in two seconds and you're set.

The Wiki feature is quite easy to use. You can put stuff on any page you open up or create. Just press the edit tab, and hit "Wiki quick help" inside the edit window for the all-important wiki syntax. To get around the site, note that the :: double colon symbols are actually buttons you press to open up sub-menus. This software has so many nice features, and it's totally Free. It is the product of a serious, sustained community development and documentation effort.

If you want to see some excellent wikis, I highly recommend the great free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as well as the funky Disinfopedia, which is:

a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.

Wikis: extensible and public. Yes.

So again, the ultimate result of this whole new thing will be something unique and totally different from hongpong.com... to another internet domain????????

Posted by HongPong at June 2, 2004 04:03 AM
Listed under HongPong-site , Open Source .