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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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.

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There, now I’m done with web design for a while. I don’t know why I get so obsessive about it. I wish I could get so obsessive about everything I need to do, at the time that I need to do it. I had planned to work on the Myth of Merula story, level up a World of Warcraft character and study the Torque Game Engine. Instead, I’m going to take a breather the rest of the day and get seriously back to work on my priorities starting on Tuesday evening.

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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.

You may need to do some further customization to get your logo to look right, if you have a logo in the upper left corner. Also, if you do not want to display the name of your site across the masthead, then remove the masthead div tag – and the h1 and h2 tags nested in it – from the roundedblue.php template. Your logo may not look good against the background image, either, so you may need to edit either your logo or the bg.jpg file, which is the image at the top in the background, to get the two images to look good together.

If you don’t want so much space at the top, edit the top margin values of the #content and the padding-top of the #column-one div tags in the main.css stylesheet. Keep in mind that it will make the background image at the top look “chopped off” at the bottom. So you’ll want to change this image, too. You will need to replace the bg.jpg image with an image that has less height.

UPDATE 2/18/07: Several people have privately emailed me regarding a bug in the layout. It breaks when pages are long. The quick and dirty fix is to make the csbbody-l.gif and csbbody-r.gif images taller. You can do that yourself now, making these images tall enough to suit your own content needs. The best fix is to use CSS for the the color and border of the rounded content box, using images only for the rounded corners. In my next version of the roundedblue and roundedsassy MediaWiki skins, I will use this more flexible method. If you want to be notified when the new version of either skin is available, I suggest you subscribe to the RSS feed for the wikis category in this blog. You will see an RSS link next to each category in the right sidebar.

UPDATE 3/18/07: When using the skin on MediaWiki 1.9.3 and viewing it in Internet Explorer 7.0, blocks of white partially cover some bullet point and main heading text. I’m working on fixing this.

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