Thu, September 1, 2005
Wikifying the FAQ wiki—12:38 PM
If you saw The Aviator (ha ha!), there's that stuff towards the end where DiCaprio is pretty much batshit insane and he's focusing on bizarre minutiae to the detriment of his own hygiene and ability to lead a normal life. (Presumably; I didn't see The Aviator. (ha ha!))
Anyway, that's what the last throes of the re-bee are reminding me of right now. The super heavy lifting items are out of the way, so there's time to focus on features that don't deserve any focus at all.
Like the viciously spurned onebee FAQ/Esoterica wiki. This was a really cute idea that came to me during a meeting at the office, so I put it together and released it onto the site, but then nothing really happened with it. That's cool. No big deal. But I couldn't bear to kill it, so I fixed it instead. Now it supports all the editing features a wiki should have, like the ability to browse through past revisions and compare them to see what's changed.
Will these features drive a renaissance of the FAQ wiki? Probably not. However, the motto of the re-bee is "Fix it or kill it." We're not going to have any half-finished features lying around like we did before. (Witness, the ancient design portfolio which was never updated from the old pH7media design.) I didn't want to kill the FAQ wiki, so I fixed it. Now it acts like you'd expect a wiki to act – especially if your idea of how a wiki should act comes from MediaWiki (the engine behind Wikipedia), since that's where most of its interface features were lifted from, along with some of its code. God bless open source software!
Now, back to my Ice Station Zebra marathon...
