Squirrel Tao » Books

Review of MediaWiki Skins Design

Jennifer Elrod — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:15:53 +0000

I wish I had the book MediaWiki Skins Design when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my philosophy subsite. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Those were the days when I didn’t have a baby. I could stay up half the night going through hours of CSS trial and error just to tweak one or two little design elements. I could never do that now. As soon as I have time I intend to use some of the info in this book to clean up my skins. Nothing like this existed to my knowledge when I set out to make my skins. Documentation is often the weakest link in the open source community. This book fills an important gap that should democratize MediaWiki even more, making it more appealing to a wider swath of the web population.

The book follows my favorite format for a technical guide, taking the reader step by step through an example that resembles the kind of thing you’d want to do in real life. It breaks down everything thoroughly with plenty of pictures. Topics covered include not only CSS but also MediaWiki PHP functions that are integrated into a MediaWiki skin. As a bonus, there is information on adding on some of the latest widgets that Web 2.0 has to offer, from thickbox to twitter. To make your skin a real professional class act, you can even learn exactly how to use licensing and copyright options and exactly how to make your skin printer friendly. If you’re going to be spending any time messing with MediaWiki skin design, and you’re like me and don’t have time to spend hours spinning your wheels, do yourself a favor and get a copy of this book.

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Wiki on Feminist Science Fiction and Musings on Legolas

Jennifer Elrod — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 02:14:56 +0000

Yesterday, while googling wikis, I found what looks like a fun and interesting wiki about feminist science fiction. It looks like it could use more contributors, but it has some interesting entries and links, like this one to an article about online female fanfiction written in Tolkien fanfiction communities on Yahoo. I learned that most online fanfiction is written by women. I also learned of the existence of “Legomances” (stories fantasizing about the author and Legolas) There’s more going on with Legolas than simple romance, thought. It’s not uncommon for fanfiction authors to look at Legolas as a Muse or at the race of elves in general as Muses.

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Books (etc) We Like

Jennifer Elrod — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 10:53:17 +0000

Books (etc) We Like has a blog widget for books. This one differs from the LibraryThing blog widget in being a list of recommended books, not a list of every book in your library. Every book purchased through Books (etc) We Like contributes donations to support a list of independent/alternative media organizations. You can still buy books from Amazon, Abe Books, Booksense, Powell’s or other participating etailers; you just start your purchases at Books (etc) We Like.

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GAM3R 7H30RY

Jennifer Elrod — Sun, 28 May 2006 16:07:06 +0000

GAM3R 7H30RY, a draft by McKenzie Wark, is another book that is being shared online before finishing and publishing it. Wark hopes to use the GAM3R 7H30RY website to foster discussion around two questions:

can we explore games as allegories for the world we live in?
can there be a critical theory of games?

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Without Gods – A Blog to Book Experiment

Jennifer Elrod — Sun, 28 May 2006 16:01:10 +0000

Without Gods is an interesting experiment in going from blog to book. Without Gods is currently a blog by Mitchell Stephens, who is writing a book on the history of atheism. He is making his writing process transparent and interactive online on his blog. The end result will be a book that will be published by Caroll and Graf. His blog has attracted a good bit of discussion and debate.

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