Down sick; installed Mediawiki

I have somehow acquired an absolutely miserable cold that is waking me up four or five times a night with coughing fits.  And I’m not talking about a delicate feminine koff-koff; we’re talking the sort of cough that makes you feel like your lungs are turning inside-out.  I’ve been hitting it with cough medication and my asthma inhaler every six hours and it’s still pretty intense.  (I’m not convinced the asthma inhaler – or the cough medicine, for that matter – is doing me any good, but it does no harm either, so what the hell.)  Ick.

However, that has not stopped me from getting about two feet of weaving done on the warp currently on the loom, or from spending a fun-filled day with manuals, online help, third-party extensions, etc.  I managed to get Mambo and Mambowiki installed on my new server before realizing that this was a distinctly suboptimal configuration, for technical reasons that I won’t bore you with (hint: Mambowiki uses I-frames).  So I went back and installed Mediawiki directly (with help from a book on setting up Mediawiki), and spent the last few hours installing a rich text editor and captcha plugins.  (In case you don’t know what a captcha is, it’s that little thing with the distorted letters that pops up when you’re filling in some online form, and asks you to identify the letters to make sure you’re not a human and not a spambot.)  I now feel significantly better about spam on the wiki.

This leaves me with the interesting question of what to put on my handweaving resource site.  I have settled on three things I would like to target initially:

• an introduction to weaving and an organized set of links to useful content, aimed at beginning to intermediate weavers;
• a project information repository (what you made, what yarn you used, what draft, etc.)
• a weaving wiki

The first and third are technically very easy, and I may work on getting them set up while I put together the project notebook.  The big tasks that remain are:

• structure the information in the wiki
• configure the wiki (lots of dull stuff like user access privileges, help files, etc.)
• structure the content in the reference (learning-to-weave) section
• Figure out if I want any of the bells-and-whistles that come free with Joomla (discussion forums, etc.)
• Rework the Joomla templates until I’m happy with the appearance (this may require learning some more CSS and PHP, as I have no familiarity with either)
• Design and code the project info notebook

Yep, looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.  Nothing un-doable, though.

My primary concern right now is how to get content into the wiki and the reference section.  I can do quite a bit, but it’s simply impossible for one person to populate an entire encyclopedia.  I’m not sure how to bring people into using/filling up the wiki.

Stuff to think about…