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Riki Tiki Wiki, Bibliowiki, Wiki Icky or Good?

(Update: I’ve set up the wiki so all pages are viewable and also taught myself a little about linking.)

After a week of rain, the sun is splashing puddles of light on the patio, my miniature roses are shyly unfurling their first buds (appropriately, Sunny Day is the first to flower each spring), and the cats are splayed belly-up near the windows, their whiskers twitching in their sleep. I set a bowl of peanuts outside the french doors to my office so the squirrels and jays will keep me company through the afternoon. The hungry critters dash up to the doorsill to grab a treat and then back away to the patio to eye me as they nibble their prizes.

Despite the temptations the day offers, I am gearing into homework mode, but I can’t resist noting that Dreamhost now offers one-click installation for wikis. Last night while listening to Marketplace I set one up. It took closer to twenty clicks, because I wanted to set up a subdomain under freerangelibrarian.com and use a separate MySQL database. Still, all in all, the whole process was a no-brainer (though amazingly, someone else at Dreamhost had already taken “wikisql” for a wiki database name).

My only problem is I don’t know what to do with my wiki.

I thought about using it for tracking my writing, so (with tip of tongue clamped between teeth) I edited the configuration file so that my wiki became a Wiki of One. Now users need to be registered by me, the Goddess-like sysop, and nonregistered users can only see main pages, which isn’t exactly what I want. I’d know how to tweak those settings if I had made it past page 3 in the book about MySQL I bought last December, but I squandered the winter break on reading and baking and general winter merriment. Where were my priorities?

I would like a wiki organized around my MFA book project. I tried an offline wiki, but it was primitive and quirky, and I do love web-based management tools, peripatetic computer user that I am. I wish the wiki had a tool for entering and managing citations. At minimum, the “tool” could be my keyboard (in conjunction with my brain). However, it would be terribly useful to have a citation-management feature for a wiki. Does something like this exist?

It’s 10 a.m., so I’m going to buckle down and work on my writing for four hours, just old-fashioned words onto page.

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This was written by K.G. Schneider. Posted on Saturday, April 9, 2005, at 9:14 am. Filed under This and That. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.