Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’

The Story behind DokuWiki’s new Template

20th October 2012

DokuWiki finally has a new default template (aka skin or theme) since its latest release (2012-10-13 “Adora Belle”). It has been active on dokuwiki.org for a few months now and I’m happy that the general opinion of it seems to be “awesome”. 🙂

That template has a long and interesting story to tell, especially about processes in the OpenSource community and the lack of designers therein. Even professional web developers will probably be surprised at how much effort actually went into making it.
So, here is its story:
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CSS Cards (Socially) Compared

28th May 2011

Since I wrote my CSS Playing Cards, I wondered how to best publish a comparison of all the various techniques of cards I found and how to keep it up-to-date.

Then I found the answer in a great new service that’s perfect for this kind of thing:
SocialCompare.com

It lets you easily create and edit comparison tables.
You can compare just about anything you can think of. Anyone (well, any registered user) can edit the tables (i.e. items and criteria) or knock something together out of already existing items. It’s more future-proof as it’s easier to update and less error-prone (if the community is there to help to maintain it). It is well thought out: You can re-arrange items and criteria to see more easily what’s important to you.

This takes the wiki concept to the next level.
If you love spreadsheets (like me), you’ll love SocialCompare.

Here is a preview of the Comparison of CSS Playing Cards I created:

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The Annotated Casanova Synopsis Wiki

3rd January 2011

One of my most favourite books ever is the Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova.
A few years ago I read the version on Gutenberg.org which unfortunately has no annotations whatsoever. The lack of annotations is a real drawback, especially as they should explain facts which were known at his time and the contemporary reader has no idea about or provide more background information on some people or translate his various Latin and other quotations.
Therefore, I planned to either buy an annotated version or search for the missing information myself. (And in the end I did both.)

But while researching all the missing bits myself, why not share it and collaborate with others who would help researching? Sounds already like a wiki, eh?
And then I read about and was fascinated by the history of the different editions and translations of the memoirs. The early editions are old enough to be in the Public Domain, so it’s easy to use them in the wiki as a basis for the annotations. So, why not present the most popular editions (French, English, German) side by side?

Well, that’s exactly what I did … I’m proud to present:
Paralis.org – The Annotated Casanova Synopsis Wiki

It’s a long way from being finished, but it’s a good start. Now I only need to keep it alive and search for collaborators.