MeyerBros --> Main --> DevelopmentBlog

looks great

I still think the text should be darker and the default text size should be one step larger (readability trumps avant-garde aesthetics), but I'll leave that up to you as the designer. Maybe Linux Firefox shows things smaller than Mac Firefox, or maybe my laptop just has a little dinky screen with poor contrast. Anyway...

No, I totally agree wiki and blog have different strengths, and I think having both is best. I'm just trying to understand the UI issues that make wiki seem "hard" and blog seem "easy" for your average user when the actual mechanics (web forms) are the same.

bring it on

we're solid in IE/WIN, Firefox, Netscape, everything I can find except IE5?/MAC which no one should ever be using anyway (though LotusNotes? tries to make me use it). You can do anything you want to the font sizes and it will never look good on a PC because you have poor anti-aliasing, but it wont break. i'll start playing with the blog now. looks like it could even be a robust enough system to move my site onto it as a faux-CMS.

I have nothing against wiki, but i think each has its purposes and advantages in different situations. wiki makes a lot of sense for some of the stuff we are doing here but not all of it. i'm excited to have both going at once.

single blog with multi-authors is the way to go. we can set up good quick links to author-based pages if people want - that'll be easy.

i'm still a developer

ok boys. here we go.

wikis and tigers and blogs, oh my

So. What makes wiki so hard to figure out? Is the edit link hard to find? Would it be easier if we made the edit link into a big fat button? What's complicated about making changes to text in an ordinary textarea? Don't you have to do basically the same thing to post to a blog (click on a button, type in a textarea)? Does it just feel more complicated because you're messing with existing text instead of getting a nice new clean textarea for your comment? Is this enough consecutive questions?

Okay, so it seems we want a blog too. WordPress is running at blog.meyerbros.org. I haven't done much with it, just configured post-by-email (for the sheer coolness of it) and a fun little plugin that makes the sidebar easily configurable. Play with it (I'll email the admin login info). So do we want a single blog (blog.meyerbros.org) with each of us as authors? Or do we want three totally separate blogs (eric.meyerbros.org, jonny.meyerbros.org, etc)?

MeyerBros goes commercial

A MeyerBros web design company is a grand idea, and I'm totally in. Except that until January 2008 my involvement would have to be haphazard and not for pay. I could volunteer some time to help get it going, but I couldn't commit serious time until I'm done with MCC.

I don't think your skills are a problem, J - depending what floats your boat, you could learn more programming and help in my areas, or focus on what I think you'd be great at already: customer relations, project management, writing. Those are critical roles.

Anyway, as far as immediate practicality: I think you guys could start the thing right now, as long as you focus on less backend-intensive sites, and I could do the necessary programming in my spare time. I'll also do what's needed infrastructure-wise (i.e. time-tracker, bug-tracker, stuff like that - also just doing the basic webserver maintenance). I think we could start up using the nonsensesoftware.com server for development. I wouldn't get paid for my time, I'd just be building "future-job-guarantee" credits :-)

p.s.

thanks mm for fixing the layout in Win/IE (not that I'd ever use it myself, it's just that we can't really point anyone else here if it doesn't work in Win/IE). I still have one complaint - the text is too small for me, especially with its grayness (actually, I just edited meyer.css myself and darkened it from #999 to #666, and h1s from #666 to #333, which helps a bit). and this leads me to another complaint - normally I could make the text larger myself, except that when I do (View | Text Size | Increase in Firefox) it breaks the layout, kinda the same way it used to be broken in Win/IE (content box below sidebar instead of next to it). Which is a problem - it would be good if our layout were a bit more robust. Let me know if you don't have time to look into this and I'll see what I can figure out.

-carl 04.06.06

web design company

i was thinking about that the other day as well, e. and i think that it's a great idea, although the main difference between the three (five?) of us is how much time we have to spend on things like this. you two by yourselves could make some pretty rockin' websites if you ask me, and i'm not sure where i'd fit in. maybe i could update and advance my php and web programming skills and help carl. but does carl have time to do this? do i, if there was something that i could do? but it's certainly worth some more discussion, fo' sho'. i mean, i feel like i have skills, and you both have skills, and hannah and michelle have skills--why not put our skills together, if they fit? and since i'm getting fired from MMA anytime now and I'm not doing Parables next year, my only source of employment is to make less than shit from GC. more thoughts on the practicality of this idea?

-jonny 04.06.06

bugs etc

1. i fixed some structural bugs IE5/MAC still wont do load right, but IE/WIN seems to, at least the version on the school computers. i still need to fix the png problem, and let me know if there's anything else.
2. i'm getting antsy to start a web design company with my bros. that's you boys. i think together we could share infrastructure, project managment, writing, design and programming fairly well. hannah and michelle could also fit in fairly well (i know michelle is interested and looking for work) if they were interested. we have all the skills necessary represented fairly strongly. management, computers, design, code, etc. hell, why not? we do it right and none of us have to work for MMA ever again... just an idea that i happen to like.

i'm a developer too!

i'm with eric that blog doesn't work so well for non-us on this platform. it took me quite a while of exploring and learning before i understood enough to create and edit my own pages. when i post papers, i really want people to be able to easily comment--do mom and dad know how to do that?

on another note, i'm now updating my pages, so therefore i feel like i'm actually part of the group! yay for me.

-jonny 03.31.06

platform

it is a bit silly to try blogging on this platform. that just isn't what it's built for. in the next few weeks I hope to be getting moveable type set up on my subdomain. MT is built for blogging (and more - I like what it can do as a CMS). I plan to use it in part for a web portfolio i'm building for class, but once we have it installed, we can easily set up several blogs on it.

in that case i would propose we set up one blog with multiple categories (say, for each of us). that would allow all our bloggings to be read on a single list, or viewed on seperate pages by author. etc. sooo many options.

i also think i found a fix for this buggy layout. basically, i just wrote crappy CSS, and have never had time to go back and do it better. who knows, if i do get round to fixing it i might just add three extra alternative css options to keep you on your toes.

so i added a license

the way copyright works, we own this site and everything on it by default, without saying anything. the point of a cc license is to make it clear exactly what we would like done or not done with our material - more friendly than making everyone guess and have to contact us for permission. i just grabbed their standard wiki one, but we can change that. i tried to add it to the template, but i seem to be having permission problems.

my design sucks on browser support.

but i'm not sure how much i care at this point. someone should let me know if it gets frustrating for them.

what i did to your pages

I moved OpenSource.About to OpenSource.HomePage and changed the relevant links. I did this because if you link to just OpenSource (like in the breadcrumb links), it by default opens OpenSource.HomePage. Except that I failed to account for the fact that it goes to Main.OpenSource first if it exists. Which it does. Oops. If you like OpenSource.About better than OpenSource.HomePage, then I apologize for my interference and will happily change it all back.

In a similar vein, and related to my thoughts about walled gardens (below), I was wondering if in the long run it might be better for the OpenSource pages to be less obviously EricMeyer linked. Not a "should", just a question in my mind about what will lead to a good wiki that encourages lots of collaboration. Is a prospective wiki-collaborator more likely to add to a page if it feels like "everyone's" instead of "yours"?

Myself, I think so. So instead of messing with your pages (sorry) I think I'll stop working on my little Carl wiki-world and start creating a lot more community-owned topic pages in the Main group (and link to them from my Carl.HomePage).

-carl 01.04.06

walled gardens

something is bothering me today. the successful wikis I've seen are made up mostly of community-owned collaborative pages based on a topic idea. there's a term used in the wiki-world for a set of self-linked pages that are mostly disconnected from the rest of the wiki: WalledGarden. Question: are you and I busily creating a couple of walled gardens here? would it be more helpful for me to stop writing on pages like Carl.ThingsOnMyMind and start creating topic pages (like the OpenSourceWriting? pages) that aren't "owned" by anybody? What do you think?

-carl 01.04.06

doode

sweet. but why can't i upload anything i've done that's larger that 50KB? that's pathetic. i don't have anything that small. now i have broken attachments on my page and i refuse to remove them until i can upload my files. that's all. Sure, 50K is small. But I do appreciate conservative default settings - uploads are dangerous. Anyway, I upped the limit to 1 meg - will that do it for you? -carl

-eric

touch the puppet head

very nice. now check out the extension I added and use on Carl.ThingsToDo and Carl.BookMarks. Handy.

-carl 01.02.06

check it out now

check out what i did on my EricMeyer.Gateway page, there's a bunch of simple coll things you can do like this, loading parts of other pages etc. it's all there in the documentation. sweet.

-eric

do we like backlinks?

I added a "page action" called 'backlinks' (check above). If you click on it, it gives you a list of all the pages that link to the one you're on. Does this help with navigational issues? What do you guys think?
i like it, but don't use it much. i'm fine either way. i feel like the structure is coming together. it gets a little confusing when everyone finds different solutions to the same problems, but it works. -eric 01.02.06

-carl 12.31.05

that css thing on edit pages

all the special css is loading from somewhere else that i dont know about. it's being pulled into the 'head' of the document itself.
this is a pain. it's hardcoded into files that are part of PmWiki, and I'd really rather minimize messing with those files, because it'll be a headache if I ever have to upgrade/reinstall PmWiki. So can you just insert an extra <style> section right before </head>, after the header text comment, in your template? This way you can override whatever you need to. I know it looks ugly in the CSS, but it's an awful lot prettier for site maintenance... -carl

-eric 12.31.05

tne problem

what's wrong with the TnE links i added? someone want to fix that? i thought http://TnE.meyerbros.org was the link, but that seems to redirect you to our wiki site. what up?
i messed this up when taking the wiki live, it's fixed now. -carl

-eric 12.29.05

and one more thing

I also put a little tricky bit of code into the Category homepage so it lists all the Category pages. Just like you wanted. If you want some other text there just add it above/below the code.

-carl 12.29.05

and... we're live

that's about all there is to say about that. oh yeah, and no second-level categories. if you go to pmwiki.org and read the FAQ the developer talks about why he didn't allow for multiple levels of nested categories.

-carl 12.29.05

this post was quickly typed in plain old qwerty

oh yeah. there's an upload password. should we get rid of it? issue is that uploading files is a bit o' security risk for the server. i'll send you guys an email with the password.

-carl 12.29.05

this post was meticulously typed in Dvorak

but the problem is something else entirely. when i try to upload a file, it calls for a password that i dont seem to know. how do i upload?

-eric 12.29.05

all my ducks in one basket

i'd say i'm ready to go live. i find it interesting that you can create only one level of sub-page. trying to create a second level simply creates a new group. anyway. i scratched that and just created the groups i wanted. centered everything on a category page.

i also made the breadcrumb into links. it's fairly worthless. especially when you click on 'categories'. o well.

-eric 12.27.05

before we do go live

sounds good. i'll have to check out how to use the category pages - maybe use that as a central structure for my pages. let's wait a bit to go live, i want to get my stuff somewhat navigable first. also: if we're now using several different groups (categories, main and profiles) should i add that back into the breadcrumb? i think i will. just watch me. i'll also try to make it link. try to stop me. bring it on.

-eric 12.27.05

probably because there is no structure yet

wiki naturally tends toward unstructured, it's just a bunch of linked pages. Whatever structure we want we have to create. Mostly I think that means putting the important things in the left bar. Also, you can create little bits of structure wherever you want (like you did on TheRules, with the links on the top and bottom.)

Where should your stuff go? Wherever you want it to be. This wiki software apparently has a Profiles group intended for, um, profiles, and it gives you a shortcut way to link to it, using a tilde (like you did: [[~eric]] ). We can use that, or not. I say we might as well, since it's there. As for whether you choose to use Eric or EricMeyer for your main page, whatev. If you plan to sign stuff with just eric, then might as well use that. You could put something on EricMeyer and on Main.EricMeyer redirecting to Eric, or whatever you like.

Best not to stress about "extra" pages floating around. Pages are so easy to create, you might as well assume that every page there could possibly be exists already, and then just make sure the pages you care about say what you want them to, and the really important ones are linked from the left bar.

is that good enough? or did I miss the point?

oh, another thing we can do for structure. if you put a link like this on a page: [[!SomeCategory]] , it links to a page in the Category group (Category.SomeCategory) . Pages in the Category group are special because below whatever text you place in them, they automagically also contain a list of all the pages that link to them using the ! syntax. Voila, a listing of all the pages that fit in that category.

As an example of this, I put a !-link to MeyerBros on my page - so my page is now part of the MeyerBros category (the only one so far - you guys could add your pages to the category just by adding that link somewhere on your page).

Carl : 12.26.05

bit of confusion about structure

should my content be here, where most of it is or here, where some of it is or here, where i was sent by some inquisitive link? please tell me. thanks.

my main concern is that i always feel lost on this site, like i can never get back to where i just came from and there's no structure to find my way around at all. everything else i absolutely love and adore. what can we do about it?

eric : 12.26.05

going live

I can switch www.meyerbros.org to point here whenever. just say the word.

totally, bro.

Carl : 12.26.05