Test drive myContent and myLZ
- 1 Background
- 1.1 my Landing Zone
- 1.2 my Content
- 2 Room for improvement
- 2.1 Per-wiki overrides for Wikia-wide user preferences
- 2.2 Enable admins to specify default content for the Widget Dashboard
- 2.3 Add custom widgets to the "Manage widgets" carousel
In the recent past I have :
- written about the "my landing zone" concept here,
- speculated on the use of a specially named User_blog page to customize the redirect from ''.wikia.com here and
- demonstrated your ability to clean up some unwanted clutter in the Monaco sidebar here.
Since then I have experimented with the Gadget Extension and discovered how relatively easy it is to setup these features today without any special development requests of Wikia. An important aspect of this is that it is provided on an opt-in b…
Should a wiki editor focus on content or style or education or all 3
I'll preface this by confessing that I am very comfortable with plain text editors and intuitively appreciate the difference between content, structure, references and decoration/style/appearance. No doubt this mindset is the product of using the only available editors at the time: ed (plus nroff for output), then emacs made life easier, then ghostscript made it harder again so that ghostview could made it prettier, then scribe and then ... et cetera et cetera.
- I appreciate that not everyone ran the same gauntlet or is wired the same way .. vive la différence!
My recent test drive of the new RTE made me a little more aware of the different approaches to document creation. So much so that on a visit to Wikipedia today a reference link caught my ey…
A vision for w:c:central
The new Wikia-wide search is absolutely awesome. Many thanks!
- There's a good chance I haven't fully explored it's capabilities yet and therefore some of these suggestions may already be enabled thanks to this new feature.
My personal bias is to use w:c:central as a body of knowledge however I can also appreciate that it has appeal for some users as a sort of cyber-supermarket - i.e. where one can browse up and down the aisles to get a feel for the variety of communities that have been created at Wikia.
- 1 Assumptions
- 2 Key ideas (in no particular order)
- 2.1 Body of knowledge principles
- 3 Permit 1on1 support dialog to be made public
- 4 Alternatives to merging w:c::help with w:c:central
- 5 Blue box pages and w:c:central:Special:Search can coexist
- 6 Reinvigorate the…
Cleaning up the sidebar when "fail to locate" a WikiPage widget
- Summary
- Using a one liner in your global.js you can
- dramatically clear up missing WikiPage widget clutter from your Monaco sidebar
- recover precious vertical screen space in that sidebar
- avoid frustration by not accidentally deleting widgets that you may need at another wiki when you eventually return there
- 1 The problem
- 2 The workaround
- 3 Consider the sidebar screenshots from 5 wikis below.
- 4 The current (cluttered) sidebars
Maybe not many people are using custom WikiPage widgets ... yet. I plan to use them extensively and plan to encouraged registered users to make full use of them as well. Many early problems have been cleaned up already. Thank you for that! One of the remaining problems with WikiPage widgets is that the UI tries to draw every widget yo…
A way to measure the popularity of the "subject" of an article
This subject interests me very much but I realize that it is considered trivia by others - that's cool. Dismiss and move on or read and leave comment as you see fit. Different strokes for different folks.
I was prompted to prepare this blog after reading a forum post this morning: Forum:Most_visited_pages
Whether my goals are the same as the author of that forum post or not I do not know for sure but for the sake of comparison you may care to take a close look at w:c:vsk:Category:Members#Manage_your_Favorites and the references provided there - starting with w:c:vsk:Template:Favorites. (Note the wiki must have the extensions: Semantic Mediawiki and Semantic Forms enabled to make use of the Manage your favorites feature described at that link.)
I was …