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. continue reading »

All those who have emailed me with questions about designing a MediaWiki skin, take note. Now there is a book for you. Packt Publishing has released a book called MediaWiki Skins Design. With the consent of the publisher, I’m releasing a sample chapter (Chapter 8, Social Networking and MediaWiki) of the book here on Squirrel Tao. Clicking the link will bring up a pdf version of the chapter. Topics include how to embed Twitter and YouTube content and how to enable social bookmarking on your wiki.

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Wikis Go Web 2.0 with OpenServing

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. continue reading »

I’ve become overly obsessive about making MediaWiki skins or something, because this morning on impulse, I started making a new color scheme for the Rounded Blue MediaWiki skin I made yesterday. Once I had started, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop until I was finished, or else it would bug me. I had really intended to do other things today, but I can’t concentrate on anything else, anyway, now that I have become so obsessive about making skins the last couple of days. The good news is that I was able to change the color scheme of the Rounded Blue skin with very minimal effort. That should show readers how easy it is to customize a skin. Just change the colors in the image files, change the background color, change the background image or get rid of it, change the link colors and change the button and bullet colors if necessary. If necessary, adjust the positioning of the content area and the left column up or down, along with the p-cactions div tag. Voila, a new look. continue reading »

Today, using my own MediaWiki skin as the basis, I altered it to make it look like the Rounded Blue Edition WordPress theme. It is available for download. Click here to go to the download page and view a small thumbnail screenshot of the Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki skin.

To use it, just unzip it and upload it into your MediaWiki installation’s skins directory. The path to the stylesheet is relative: skins/roundedblue/main.css. Change the path if for some reason the stylesheet is not being applied. You’ll find the path in the roundedblue.php file, in the HTML head section, right underneath the title tag.

The Photoshop images that are used for the header background image, the rounded corner content boxes, etc. are available at itcouldbethisone.com for download. continue reading »

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a custom skin for the Living Philosophy Wiki. Now it has the same look and feel as the Squirrel Tao blog. Like the Squirrel Tao theme, it is based upon a customization of the Rounded V2 WordPress theme by Ghyslain Armand. In the process of customizing my wiki skin, I’ve also integrated the blog with the wiki, so that both share a navigation bar in common.

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. continue reading »

What cool open source stuff I have learned about since joining the luf-team Yahoo group! Reading The Millennial Project for science fiction research, as I recently blogged about, led me to the luf-team Yahoo group. It’s always nice when something cool falls into my lap without effort. So often in life, I have put a lot of effort into various endeavors, only to find that, my efforts have proven counter-productive to my current goals. When one good thing leads to another good thing effortlessly, it helps to make up for life’s little ironies. I have learned that there is actually such a thing as open source hardware! How exciting!

The Fabber, a Fabulous 3D Printer You Can Make At Home

One of the most exciting inventions I have ever encountered is the Fabber. The Fabber is a 3D printer that people can make themselves, using open source instructions and readily available materials. It can be used for rapid prototyping. Theoretically, anything that you can design in 3D modeling software, you can print using the Fabber. Think of your 3D object as being cut into hundreds of tiny slices. Each slice is printed out in 2D on top of the previous slice. That is sort of how the Fabber works. The big breakthrough is that the Fabber is in reach of the budget of garage inventors, unlike commerically sold 3D printers. continue reading »

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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Today I started a wiki about philosophy. I’ve decided to call it the Living Philosophy Wiki. This is what I wrote about it today, on its About page. continue reading »

Jimmy Wales, the founder of WikiPedia, founded a new political wiki, called Campaigns Wikia. I like the concept, and I hope it succeeds. In the Campaigns Wikia mission statement, Jimmy calls broadcast politics dumb, dumb, dumb. I thoroughly agree. While the stupidity of TV political discourse makes Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s jobs easier, it doesn’t provide any other benefits to anybody (at least, not to anybody who is not evil and does not want to take over the world). Jimmy wants to offer a more intelligent alternative. I’ll be following the development of Campaigns Wikia with interest. It will be what the people who edit make it, just as WikiPedia was and is. I like the fact that a lot of information and discussion will be consolidated in one place, where it will be less ephemeral than that generated by a blog or discussion forum.

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