Posts in category 'wiki'
Knitting Miscellany
So blanket construction continues unabated. In fact, in the three days I was in Regina for Thanksgiving, I completed another 4 1/2 panels, which brings me to a total of 9… over one third of the way there! On the hex components, anyway. ‘course, I still haven’t blocked them out, but I’m sure I’ll get around to that eventually.
On a separate but related note, quite a while ago, I embarked on a rather ambitious project: to start a knitting wiki. Unfortunately, as often happens with my projects, I made a reasonable amount of progress in secret before life got in the way and it ended up on the back-burner. However, the recent discovery of another knitting wiki project on Wikia (a Wikimedia-powered free wiki-hosting service) has brough the project back to life. For now.
See, apparently someone else had the same bright idea I did… and the same amount of dedication. Thus, the Wikia site had been languishing for about a year, just waiting to be populated. So I’ve decided to try and adopt the project. I’ve already ported all my content over there, boosting the site from a measley 9 pages to a whopping 31, and I’ve started the process of lightly re-organizing things before generating new material. My ultimate goal would be to generate an all-encompassing repository of knitting knowledge. A resource that could rival those found in traditionally expensive (and difficult to find) knitting books. Of course, we’ll see how long it is before I get bored of the whole idea. :)
Of course, by now, you’re probably wondering where it is. Well, feel free to head over to KnitWiki! And in case you’re wondering, yes, those shots with the green yarn are pictures of me knitting. And yes, taking them required some rather odd contortions…
The Gallery Cometh
I decided to take a tour through my collection of digital camera photos and was, frankly, surprised at how much stuff I had. Worse, none of it was terribly accessible nor shareable. And so I finally cracked and decided it was time to get some kind of photo gallery going on.
Now, I could have one with Gallery, which Brad has used to power his photo gallery, but I really wanted something that would integrate directly into my wiki, so that I could easily incorporate gallery photos into wiki pages, comment on them in the normal fashion, etc, etc. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort really exists for Oddmuse, meaning it was time to roll my own.
The result is my Gallery. It’s pretty bare bones, at this point… really, it’s just functional enough to be useful. It can:
- Add galleries and images through a standard web interface.
- Support infinite nesting of galleries.
- Handle zips and tarballs, as well as standard image formats.
- Does the usual pagination stuff, so you don’t get all gallery images at once.
- Does on-demand scaling of images, so people can choose different resolutions.
And all of this is done in the context of the standard wiki subsystems, so you can comment, search, etc (though search is b0rked for image captions and descriptions right now… that’s on my todo list).
Anyway, there you have it. Take a look. Give me feedback if you like. And if I can make the code, you know, not horrible, I’ll release the source to it.
What's In A Name?
Hmm, apparently I’m in the mood for clichés… anyway, for those few (very few) readers I have, you might notice the name change for this site. Well, when I first created this site, it’s main purpose was to act as a place for me to host information about my various projects. As a result, I just picked the first lame-ass name that came to mind. But, as my site has grown, I quickly realized that a name change was inevitable. And that day has finally come.
But why “The ‘B’ Ark”? Well, my fellow Douglas Adams fans will recognize the name of that fateful ship launched from Golgafrincham, packed with its telephone sanitizers, marketing personelle, and other “undesirables”, which ultimately crashed on Earth and populated the planet with our forebearers. Thus, the name is a little nod to one of my very favourite authors (who died far too soon). It also seems appropriate that, had bloggers existed at the time Hitchhiker’s was written, they probably would have been included on the “B” Ark. And of course it seems hardly a coincidence that “B” is for blogger and “B” is for Brett! So multilayered…
Wiki Upgrades
So in attempt to stay reasonably current, I’ve upgraded the version of OddMuse I’m using to the latest revision. If anyone finds anything odd, lemme know so I can fix it… assuming it worked before, of course. ;)