Home » The PARIS Forums » PARIS: Main » ANNOUNCEMENT: the PARIS Wiki is born!
| ANNOUNCEMENT: the PARIS Wiki is born! [message #97922] |
Fri, 11 April 2008 14:33  |
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Greetings all!
Technology sure changes fast. A piece of technology became available to me a
while back that finally allowed me to build what I used to just dream about.
Namely - there is now a PARISWiki where PARIS aficionados can compile all
existing data concerning PARIS. I've started the ball rolling by beginning
the process of converting and compiling the varied and valuable information
found amongst the various official and unofficial FAQs.
You might want to read the rest of the email before you click, but the site
is linked at the bottom if you're not a "manuals" type.
For those unfamiliar with the term - a "Wiki" is a collaborative,
community-driven encyclopedia. You don't complain to someone when you spot
something wrong or incomplete or missing - you *fix it yourself*. To do this
is trivially easy - once you're registered and logged in, double-click
directly on the page you're reading and an editor opens. You can begin
entering/editing text right there. If you want to create a new page, you
just type a "CamelCase" word as you're editing (any word with an initial cap
and another capital within it, like AppMessage) and when you "store" the
page the cunning macros behind the Wiki turn it into a hyperlink with dashes
under it. Click on this and a new page with that name is created and saved
(before you do that, you might want to look at the page index to make sure
you aren't creating a duplicate). Yeah - you read that right - essentially
creating a hyperlink to a non-existing page, and then clicking on it,
actually creates the page.
Now some important info.
This site is *free*. By *free*, I mean - I am donating the time to build and
maintain it; donating the bandwidth and server space to serve it; there are
no "gotchas", no "enter your credit card", no "donate" buttuns and no ads; I
will never sell, trade, share or knowingly make your email addresses
available to others. In short, this is a "labour of love". Unless the
bandwidth goes absolutely insane, I can't see ever needing to "pass the hat"
for donations; if that ever happened (I doubt it, I have up to three
terabytes of bandwidth on the account it's served on) I'd talk it through
with the community before doing that in case someone in the community simply
wanted to serve it elsewhere. Failing those sort of unforeseen and unlikely
circumstances, I am happy to continue serving this for at least the next
eighteen months. If things go well, I have no problem keeping it going for
as long after that as I can foresee (ask me if you want to mirror it
elsewhere - assuming you don't want to mirror it on some white supremacist
hate site I'll almost certainly say yes, but let's make it a real mirror and
not a copy so multiple sites don't develop different content).
What I *would* ask for in return, however is participation. If I wanted my
own Private PARIS Manual, I could have done it on my own hard drive easily
without the hassle of maintaining it on a site. This Wiki is meant to be a
community service - and it is also intended to be nearly entirely
community-driven. As long as the community continues to participate, not
merely by reading but by *contributing information*, I'll continue to do my
part by running the back office. I hope that seems fair.
Aside from that, the conditions of use are largely common sense (I think
everyone's smart enough not to kill it instantly by posting illegal or
offensive material; arguments stay offsite; let's keep it focused; etc) and
are printed on the front page. Registration is automatic (ie open to any
PARIS user, past or present, no matter how casual a user) and takes all of
about thirty seconds.
A further note on registration - it's open for all. The technology exists to
take it private, to require admin approval for who registers, etc etc; it
can be made very secure. However I'd like to start by assuming "if I need to
secure it, I'll secure it, but until then, welcome one and all!". So
registration is automatic, nobody "approves it".
Plans for this Wiki are fairly ambitious, but I'd hope realistic and
sustainable. For example - amongst other developments, Aaron Allen and Chuck
Duffy have graciously given their consent for the Wiki to serve the Brian
Tankersley video, which (pending confirmation from BT), I'd like to see
broken into chapters and inserted in the relevant topics. I'd do this
pretty much ASAP pending hearing back from BT (anyone got a current contact
email, shoot it to me privately).
In addition, it's "skinnable" so the plain vanilla interface will go away at
some point (when I get time) and be replaced by a slicker custom "look". I
will be investigating the ins-and-outs of posting whole sections from the
actual manual inline so they can be woven in with practical observations.
The technologies behind this thing are incredible; there are so many things
you can do with this data once you've got it entered, it's amazing. Sortable
plugin databases so you can find all compressors or all delays and choose
one by feature or applicability (hey, don't laugh; you may not think you
need this now, but look at how fast Mike Audet is developing new ones now
he's hitting his stride!); key commands databased so you can pull up all the
editing modifiers in a hurry - I have hopes that as this grows it can become
a "leave open in the background" quick reference/help file. It's also going
to be a place to collect some of the history and "back-story" of the
platform, its developers and designers.
I want to take a second here and express my gratitude to some particular
people for their support, enthusiasm and cooperation in advance of rollout;
Aaron Allen, Chuck Duffy, "Hiddensounds" Kim, Steve "artguy", Mike Arnao and
Mike Audet.
For their invaluable work as PARIS' "de facto" maintainers of the Archives,
Steve "artguy" (whose last name I now commit to spelling correctly), John
Bercik and Doug Wellington - and Kim for hist maintenance of the NG,
essentially the "collective memory" of the community - and last but not
least those many whose contributed insights form the backbone of the Wiki.
An extremely quick tutorial is available linked to the front page, followed
by detailed documentation afterwards. You aren't going to believe how easy -
and even fun - it is when you get the hang of it. But there's a test area
called the SandBox where you can mess around without hurting anything.
Okidoki. More to come, but I'll shut up now. Kim's kindly made the
"theproject" NG available for Wiki business, so if you want to talk
technical specifics, ie formatting, skins, concept, data organization,
that'd be a great place to keep it grouped and threaded together.
<<<<<
And now, the Wiki. I hope you enjoy it. (watch out for bad line wraps in the
URLs)
Home page -
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=HomeP age
Some pages are more fleshed in than others:
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=BugsT roubleshooting
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=Sessi onTracking
Some are "getting there":
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=Windo wPatchBay
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=Acces sWin
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=Paris NoNos
Sample plugin page:
http://www.kerrygalloway.com/WikiPARIS/wikka.php?wakka=NoLim it
And remember - if you see bad info there, or something missing - don't
complain, log in and fix it! If I missed your contribution - sorry! Log in
and fix it! If I... well, you get the picture.
Welcome, and enjoy.
- Kerry
"... being bitter is like swallowing poison and waiting for the other guy to die..." - anon
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