This weblog post is a little more personal than my other post
The process of organizing the wiki community - already parts of it that are organized, but for the most part, it is a bunch of interesting people doing interesting things. “The Universal “Wiki” Edit Button leads to a page where you can collaborate, not just comment, commit or comply.” — Ward Cunningham, Inventor of Wiki
Personally, I am most excited by the Oddmuse implementation and am looking forward to extending that wiki out to more people’s attention.
It was very exciting to see wiki developers and wiki hosts extend their wikis into this idea and add themselves to the list.
All in all, this has been a fun few weeks, culminating in an exciting 30 hours or so. As with wiki, I look forward to what others will make of this.
“The amazing quality of many wikis, especially wikipedia, makes people afraid to contribute. But wikis want you to edit them. This button is meant as an invitation for surfers to contribute as much or as little as they want.” — Ehud Lamm
RecentChangesCamp Montreal, aptly named RoCoCo - a wiki style bar camp brought together some amazing minds from the wiki world. An unconference in style, a physical representation of wiki - these wiki camps let people decide the agenda and purpose of why they are there.
Participants at RoCoCo spanned from the West Coast of North America to Europe.
Nine wiki developers at RoCoCo formed a collaborative group to better communicate amongst wikis. A weekly IRC meeting is planned for the first Tuesday of each month at 21:00 GMT on irc.freenode.net, #wikiohana. Among the topics to be discussed are OpenID, wiki markup and an extended interwiki / sisterwiki map. A bot is in place to capture discussions and the chat room is open for use any time for those interested. Notes on the collaborative efforts can be found at [1].
Wikithon.org type house parties that teach wiki and the wiki way. - EugeneKim mentioned that Socialtext.com was doing similar type events.. parties to work on other wikis than your own.
WikiWednesday.org - co-located by time - a likely candidate is the day after the WikiTechTuesday IRC meetings, the first Tuesday each month.
WikiClock.org - The Wikiclock was created as part of the “Wiki and…” project, as a demonstration of the silly extent that we sometimes over-use Wiki technology.
A wonderful event in Montreal. Much love and respect to the folks that put the work into making this event great. Also to all the people that showed up to energize another unconference focused on wiki and the wiki way.
Notes to come, but here is a video (it would be great if, through the lazy web, folks would translate the english to french and french to english, so the next revision would have subtitles.)
Our former hoster, Dreamhost, had a server failure about noon on Saturday, May 5th that caused 23 of our wikis and blogs to go down including WikiIndex.org and RecentChanges.info. They brought up a replacement server on Sunday the 6th but were unable to restore our sites from either the failed server or the server backups and that condition remains today. Luckily the databases for the sites were not affected because they were on a separate server and we were able to pull the very latest data out of the database.
We had already made the decision to move from Dreamhost to 1and1 before this failure occurred because of the many outages and very bad performance of Dreamhost, so we decided to rebuild all of the sites on 1and1. Some of our sites are quite large and uploading just the images can take over a day, so restoring the sites is really a pain. Dreamhost and 1and1 are on different versions of the MySQL database and restoration without corrupting the data proved a bit daunting for a while until we found the magic bullet. Most of our wikis are now operational including WikiIndex but several sites are still awaiting name transfers and some wikis have yet to be restored.
There are almost always losses when this kind of thing happens and for WikiIndex we lost images that were entered between 15 Dec 2006 and 5 May 2007. Most of these are logos and they can be recovered as we get the chance. The image loss was the result of poor judgment on my part because I had elected to backup the image directories on the server that failed because of their size.
If you run across a missing image just re-upload it under the same name and all should be ok. If you notice any configuration or extension issues just let me know and I’ll track them down.
Sorry for any inconvenience this outage may have caused.
It redirects now, so all is good.