I made a few behind-the-scenes changes around here that should, hopefully, be completely invisible to the casual reader… The most visible thing is that Quizzes now have their own category. I realized that I’d posted enough links to internet surveys and such that they deserved a category of their own. So, if you feel the need to find out what Sci-Fi Character you are, or what They Might Be Giants album best fits you, you’ll find the links over there on the navigation bar.
That’s the wacky part. The Wiki part is something that may not go public for quite a while, if ever. Basically, I started playing around with PHPWiki as a way to organize notes for various work and personal projects. It’s incredibly freekin’ cool… Imagine being able to blather on about pretty much any topic, and if you come across something you want to elaborate later, all you need to do is to capitalize words and ShoveThemTogetherLikeThis in order to create a new web page where you can fill more stuff in later.
A lot of the personal stuff I’m using it for is gaming related. It’s a great way to integrate side paths and character links for a situation where a lot of the plot depends on the actions of the individual, unpredictable characters. And if one of the players does something completely unexpected, you can quickly make a note of it to follow up on later… As some of my games wind down, I may post the notes here, but until then it might spoil some of the behind the scenes stuff for the players.
As far as work goes, it’s a great collaborative environment to hash things out. Depending on how things are set up, pretty much anyone can edit pages… Which is one reason that I’m not going to post it here. I’ve had enough trouble with people posting advertisements in my comments here, I sure don’t want them messing up my office. Also, the work related stuff is raw enough that it just plain shouldn’t ever see the light of day… It’s not that it’d put patient data in the public eye or anything HIPPA related, it’s just a lot of preliminary web designs, notes, sketches and shouting back and forth between folks in half a dozen offices.
Still, I’ve been singing the praises of the Wiki to pretty much any and all of my geek-minded creative-type friends. It’s incredibly easy to get a Wiki up and running on a stock OS X machine… There’s instructions on how to do so over at the O’Reilly Press Mac Developer’s Center. They could apply to pretty much any *nix based system without many changes. For you Windows users out there… well… It’s incredibly easy to get a Wiki up and running on a stock OS X machine.