Browse all the entries under Myth of Merula, Philosophy Wiki.

I’m definitely not a confessional writer! Not much to confess these days, anyway, other than to say that I have only done prenatal yoga exercises twice during this whole Christmas break. Oh, and I told my husband to stop carrying our cat Marten to bed at night, because we need to wean him from our bed with a baby due to be here in few weeks. But then this morning, I carried Marten to bed. At times, I have considered somehow working pregnancy into the story, especially when I learned that a fetus goes through phases of development that resemble human evolution and that, when it is born, it essentially transitions from being an aquatic creature to living on land. It would just have been too weird, though. I didn’t want to mix up my feelings about my unborn child with my feelings about the story.

Browse all the entries under Myth of Merula, Philosophy Wiki.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much content yet, and I had just made a decision to change the whole framework of the wiki, anyway. I feel worse about the loss of users. I only had three besides myself, and of those, only one had contributed. If you had an account with my philosophy wiki, please accept my apology. I didn’t delete your account on purpose. You are welcome back at any time.

Ironically, it will now be easier to proceed with my recent decision to redo the whole wiki to make it entirely fictional in nature. Yes, it sounds weird, but I have decided to make the entire DreamFishery.com website a fictional site. Squirrel Tao will be the only exception. It will continue to be my blog, and its topics will be the same. As for the rest of DreamFishery.com, it will be as if Alice Mountolive, the narrator of The Myth of Merula, is also the narrator of the philosophy wiki and the webmaster of the whole Website.

Browse all the entries under Philosophy Wiki.

I just learned a couple days ago that Wikia is launching Openserving, which will freely host wikis and will allow each wiki owner to keep 100% of advertising revenue. These freely hosted wikis will not be plain vanilla MediaWiki wikis. They will be wikis that have been souped up to incorporate elements of social web communities like Digg. An example of what I’m talking about can be viewed at the ArmchairGM website. Wikia, which is a for-profit organization started by the Wikipedia founders, has purchased ArmchairGM for $2 million in cach and Wikia stock.

Could the Living Philosophy Wiki Find a Better Home in the Openserving Community?

As soon as I learned about Openserving, my first thought was that the Openserving community may be a more appropriate location for the Living Philosophy Wiki. I had several reasons in mind. First, the Digg-like features would make it easier for participants to get started. Second, even if they did not contribute content themselves, they could still vote on the content and comments of others. Third, I would never have to worry about server space or bandwidth, if the philosophy wiki should ever become very successful. Fourth, the wiki would be located in more of a community space and less my personal space. Fifth, people may be more willing to invest their participation in a community site they know has a better chance of lasting and of being visited by others. Therefore, curious about the Openserving community-to-be, I registered for a site.

The Problem with Subcategories

The first thing I noticed was that I would not be able to start a philosophy wiki without choosing a subcategory such as epistemology, ethics or metaphysics. This immediately changed everything. As I wrote when I started the Living Philosophy Wiki, one of my main inspirations was Ken Wilber’s integral philosophy. The concept integral means many things when it is fully grasped. One thing it does not mean is a heap of parts or subcategories that are not part of a greater whole, a greater whole that trascends all of them and gets them all working together.

Still, Openserving Will Be “Where It’s At” – and I Guess Ken Wilber Will Be Okay without Me, Anway

In spite of my critique, the Openserving philosophy wikis will no doubt attract more traffic and participation than my little philosophy wiki. I guess Ken Wilber will have to worry about the development of his integral philosophy himself. I never knew exactly how I was going to go about improving it, anyway, without bringing his ire upon my wiki. I couldn’t exactly violate copyright by duplicating all his texts in my wiki. Even if I could, he would probably just love it if a whole community of people were to go at his texts with their own edits. Heh.

I’ve Come Full Circle but Fully Let Go This Time

After considering all of the above factors, I have come full circle, back to the place where I was when I wrote that the Living Philosophy Wiki may just be my personal wiki for now. There is one difference this time, though. Now there are going to be other philosophy wikis out there, besides mine, and they will be “where it’s at”. With that in mind, I have let go of the last of my hesitations about personalizing my philosophy wiki. In fact, I have decided to change its name to the DreamFishery Philosophy Wiki and to change the whole way that it’s organized. For now and for a long time to come – and maybe always – it’s going to be all about the weird thoughts that I get as I write The Myth of Merula. Not only the writing of the Myth of Merula, but also the fiction research I do along the way – research that may or may not wind up actually getting used in The Myth of Merula – will feed into the philosophy wiki. People will still be able to participate in adding and editing content to it at any time. They may or may not ever feel motivated to do so, to any great extent. Either way, I will be content. Of course, I will always hold out the hope that a conversation will ensue within the wiki and that it will lead to content greater than I could have imagined or written alone.

Browse all the entries under Philosophy Wiki, Wikis.

The First Stumbling Block – A Broken Stylesheet Link

I had started to create a custom skin several times in the past, using the instructions that can be found on the Jnana Base wiki, only to encounter a problem after Step 8. That is, I would make a copy of the default monobook skin and rename it. I would change “monobook” to my own skin name, everywhere the word “monobook” appeared within my own skin php file. I would upload my new skin and set my personal preference to use this skin. Voila, I would excitedly preview my work only to see completely unstyled HTML, all laid out in one single column, in Times New Roman, with huge H1 headings and the whole bit. It turned out that the link to the stylesheet was broken. When I hard-coded the link to the stylesheet, my custom skin finally became applied to my wiki. In other words, I simply used the literal url to the stylesheet, in place of the PHP code that is supposed to dynamically find the stylesheet of the active skin. (This hard-coded url to the stylesheet would not work for a skin that was packaged to be used in any MediaWiki installation, but it works okay for my own site.)

The Second Issue – Margins and Negative Margins in Content and Column-Content Divs

The second frustrating issue I encountered was that, in Internet Explorer, the first column (in the column-one div) would wrap to the bottom of the content column, rather than appearing to the left of it. The layout looked just fine in Firefox. I tried playing with absolute and relative positioning, height and width, margins and padding, float settings, etc. Nothing worked. Finally, as a test, I copied and pasted the css for the column-content and content div tags from the monobook main.css file into my css file. It fixed the problem like magic. Upon examining the css, I saw that it was very important to specify the left margins for the column-content and content divs, such that a value of x in the content div should be a value of -x in the column-content div.
Simply giving the column-one div absolute positioning would not work, since this div contains all the portlets. I did not want all of the portlets to appear in the left column. I wanted the p-personal portlet to appear in the upper right of the screen, while I wanted to p-cactions portlet to appear just above of the main content first heading. These portlets could not simply be moved out of the column-one div, because doing so would place them out of the php loop that renders all of the portlets and their values.

From There On Out, Making a MediaWiki Skin Was Just Ordinary CSS Styling

After dealing with the first two frustrations, the remaining tweaks and changes were just like any other CSS styling. Styling a MediaWiki skin is similar to styling a WordPress theme. It’s just a matter of placing div tags around the php code that renders the elements you wish to style. This can be challenging and tedious enough in itself, depending upon what you want to do. I find that everything looks good in Firefox before I get it looking good in I.E. These are normal, garden variety CSS frustrations, though. After getting past the initial stumbling blocks, making a MediaWiki skin is within the reach of anybody who has moderate to advanced CSS skills.

Browse all the entries under Philosophy Wiki, Web Design, Wikis.