Technically Thinking

Mediawiki is the server-side wiki software used by Wikipedia and many other wiki websites. Although installing Mediawiki and editing articles is very easy, there is a learning curve associated with developing and maintaining a wiki. This article aims to breakdown the things I learned in the process of building my first wiki site (Campers Wiki) and includes links to various pages that I found helpful.

INSTALL AND USER GUIDE

To start, here are some links related to the basics (downloading and installing MediaWiki and editing pages):

Download: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download
Install Guide: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation
User Guide: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Contents
Editor Cheat Sheet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet

PRETTY URLS

Setting up pretty URLs is important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization): http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL

CACHING

Set up memcached to speed up mediawiki. Mediawiki will ask for the ip/port of memcached server during the initial install. On Ubuntu I was able to install via apt-get and set it up very painlessly. One downside, is that pages are cached and sometimes will sometimes not show changes immediately. An article’s cache can be purged by adding ?action=purge to the article’s URL.

EXTENSIONS

Mediawiki’s base functionality is limited in certain areas… Extensions can be added to improve it. The spam and template sections will involve setting up extensions.

SPAM

By default mediawiki is set up such that anonymous visitors can make changes. This makes it easy for anyone to make changes on the site, but leaves the site more open to spam… Thus, the 5 steps described in this article should be followed: Holy Grail for Blocking Spam in MediaWiki

TEMPLATES

Mediawiki articles can use templates to make life easier for editors and give articles consistency.

Here’s an example… This is the wikipedia article regarding PHP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Php
If you click on the edit this page tab at the top of that page, you’ll see the source code for that article. At the top is a section that looks like this:

{{infobox programming language
| name = PHP
| logo = [[Image:PHP logo.svg|180px|PHP]]
| designer = [[Rasmus Lerdorf]]
…..
}}

That is passing various parameters to the “infobox programming language” template. This creates the nice looking box on the right side of that article. That template can be edited by going to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox_programming_language

Note: underscores and spaces are interchangeable in mediawiki URLs

That template (along with most other templates) uses if-statements to make the look cleaner when not all parameters are passed. These if-statements and other similar functions are only available if you install the Parser Functions Extension:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions

More Information on Templates: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Template
That information assumes the parser functions extension is installed

CHANGING THE DEFAULT SKIN

http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/mediawiki/mediawiki_skins.htm

CATEGORIES

All articles inside a wiki should be associated with one or more categories. This ensures that there are no orphan pages and makes it easy to find other articles associated with a particular article. It also ensures that search engines can properly index your wiki site. It is important that all wiki pages are categorized.

Info Regarding Categories: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Category

Dave

I just got a BlackBerry Curve. One of the first things I was interested in getting working was an ssh client. I was very pleased to find MidpSSH had a free mobile ssh client that worked on the BlackBerry. Here is the short and sweet installation (exact steps may vary depending on your BB version):

1. Open the browser on your BlackBerry, click the “menu” button and then click the “Go To…” link. Navigate to the MidpSSH download url, http://xk72.com/wap (as described on their download page).
2. Click on the “Latest Stable Release” link. Navigate to the BlackBerry Build section and download the OS version that matches your BlackBerry OS. Follow the on-screen steps.

The MidpSSH software should now be installed. When I attempted to connect to a server at this point I received the error:

Session Error - Writer: Invalid tunnel name

If you receive this error, refer to this forum post regarding Configuring Full Internet Access on your BlackBerry. I needed to configure my APN by going to Options -> Advanced Options -> TCP. The APN settings for common providers are listed on that forum post.

That’s it. You should now be able to create a new session in MidpSSH and make an ssh connection.

Dave