Linux.ie as a Wiki (was Re: [ILUG] AGM Annoucement)

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 09:27:47AM -0700, Justin Mason wrote:
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> Colm MacCarthaigh writes:
> > On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 11:56:00AM +0100, Donncha O Caoimh wrote:
> > > Justin raises a good question, that's been discussed before. Should we 
> > > turn the www.linux.ie website into a Wiki?
> > 
> > Web browsers make *terrible* editors. Justin pointed me at the mozex
> > mozilla extension, but it doesn't seem to work :( 
> 
> nah, it does work.  its UI is a little odd though:

I won't even install for me :/ I go to http://mozex.mozdev.org/installation.html
and following the click here link gets an unknown download error (it's
not a 404 or anything server-side like that, since grabbing
downloads.us-east3.mozdev.org/mozex/mozex-1.07.xpi by hand works fine.
It just won't install for me in Firefox :(

So I try the same thing from:

	http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/mozex

And I get the same deal, I get told it's a download error, when the
resource is downloading fine. I've managed to install numerous other
extensions just fine, so I'm guessing it's some problem with the XPI
file. This is all using the latest version of Firefox, which seems
otherwise fine :/ 

>     1. right click on text-box
>     2. select "mozex -> Edit Textarea"
>     3. your favourite editor appears
>     4. edit the text
>     5. save and quit the editor
>     6. click in the textbox and the text will change to what you
>        wrote in the editor (this step is a little unintuitive!)

I can't even get this far :)

> > If world-editable
> > website content is desirable, a world-writable CVS or subversion tree
> > would be a lot better imo :)
> 
> spoken like a true ASFer ;)   The "edit in browser" is a killer feature of
> wikis, imo.

Well you're right about it being a killer ;) I just can't stand the
things, we have rich environments for editing and a <textarea> is not
one of them ;) Bah, if only WebDAV was better supported.

>   there's very little barrier to entry to edit a page that way.

In general it lowers the barrier to entry, yep. I know for at least me,
it raises the barrier though. Does contributing to linux.ie need that
low a barrier to entry? Being able to use 3 cvs commands (checkout,
update & commit) is a pretty small clue-filter :)

> By requiring someone check out a site using a tool that may not even
> be installed on their OS, you're restricting editing to a tiny group
> by comparison.

It's pretty easy to install CVS, even on Windows (where TortoiseCVS
is the business!)

Judging by IRC banter, I'm very clearly in the minority on all this, but
it would be nice to have some other kind of submission mechanism aswell
for the mad people people like me.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net