Web hosting headaches

July 19th, 2007

Howdy Folks,

Last night our hosting company disabled WikiIndex because it was over the size limit. We are working to figure out a solution to this asap.

We suggested that they try to communicate with us prior to an action like that in the future.

Wikis in Libraries

June 16th, 2007

“He emphasized that the strength of a resource depends on the strength of the community.”

Library 2.0 : Chad Boeninger - Wikis in Libraries

Chad Boeninger - Wikis in Libraries : Enhancing Services, Promoting Sources, and Building Community

Chad started off with a show of hands - what type of librarian’s were in the audience, including media specialists.

WikiIndex gets a mention in this pretty nice write up about what wikis are.

via LibrarySupportStaff.org

Wow. Five Languages

June 14th, 2007

I have been working so much at AboutUs, that I haven’t noticed that the WikiIndex page at the wiki is now in five, count them 5! languages.

It is great to see so many folks doing work here :-D

Anyone can make it six!

Help! MediaWiki FrankenSpammer bot attacks

June 12th, 2007

 Folks, anyone know what is going on and more importantly, how to stop it?

Check out these wiki that I work on, specifically the bot looking login spammer:

RecentChangesCamp wiki

CGEU wiki

Thanks for any help! ~~ Mark

List of Medical Wikis

June 9th, 2007

List of Medical Wikis 

HOLY COW!! 49

WikiIndex reference

June 5th, 2007

WikiIndex was in what looks to be a high profile weblog today!

j’s scratchpad: SLA: Mary Ellen Bates’ Searching the New Web

I *loved* the reference to the new Web, instead of the dreaded Web 2.0 (I am still waiting for Web 1.0)

Added a .com instead of my preffered .org, but that is ok! :-) It redirects now, so all is good.

RoCoCoCamp.info

May 29th, 2007

Event recap

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.

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Developers get together

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].

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Synergy At Work

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Strong European contingent

Many folks from Europe were here and it was extremely productive to learn from their work!

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Wiki Film

via YouTube.com

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One Laptop Per Child

Really cute, durable childeren’s laptops!

509599469_50bd809714.jpg

image via Flickr.com

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Demonstrations on User Interface

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Some of the folks involved:

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Event organized by

RoCoCoCamp!

May 24th, 2007

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.)

Looks to be a bunch of cool ideas to emerge from the event: RoCoCoCamp.info/FutureChanges

More info at RoCoCoCamp.info and AboutUs.org/RoCoCoCamp.info

Dreamhost Disaster

May 18th, 2007

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.

John 22:09, 15 May 2007 (EDT)

Wired.com: U.S. Adds Wiki to Spy Arsenal

May 18th, 2007

old post…

“Eugeen Kim”:http://www.eekim.com/blog/2006/09/27/intelligencefuture2#nidL8M has much experience with the wiki / military intelligence communities.
Personally, last year at the first “WikiSym”:http://www.wikiindex.org/WikiSym2005 I had a lengthy conversation from a tech guy from the Navy. His boss told him to come find out what all the wiki craze was about.

A year later we have the “Intellipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia wiki with it’s own version of the “Barnstar”:http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BarnStar

Check out the “Wired.com”:http://AboutUs.org/Wired.com article “U.S. Adds Wiki to Spy Arsenal”:http://wired.com/news/wireservice/0,72053-0.html?tw=wn_index_12