First of all, read the Policy! That will make the simple things work well. Once you've mastered the policy items, you'll want to do some other things…

These things may be more obvious if you've had experience with wikis before.

To create a page

There are two ways. The first way (which is the one I always use) is to type something like "Take a look at my new page about [[bumblebee_mating_rituals?]]!" Then, when you reload the current page, you'll see a questionmark behind the "link" you're creating. Once you edit and save the new page, the link from the old page will not be a questionmark anymore, but rather, will just be the text you've put inbetween the double square brackets. The other way is to visit a URL of the form http://oddwiki.taoriver.net/wiki.pl/AsteroidMeta/my_new_page Your browser will bring you to the page (pointing out that it doesn't exist yet) and you will then have the chance to edit it. But if you do things this way, your page won't be linked to any other pages, which would be sort of a shame.

To sign your entries with a date

If AsteroidMeta was running elsewhere, we could install extensions that would make this easy. However, right now you can also make it easy by editing your wiki pages with emacs! Here's how I do that.

1. Lynx is my main browser.
2. I have the Lynx editor set up to be emacsclient.
3. I have an emacs open and an emacs "server" running.
4. Every time I want to edit a text field for the wiki, I type C-x C-e, and the text field opens up as a new buffer in Emacs. Editing buffers with Emacs is a good thing (eversomuch more convenient than the text fields of normal browsers).
5. I wrote a little function that inserts my signature and the date (and I have this bound to a convenient keystroke):

   (defun insert-wiki-sig ()
     (interactive)
     (insert "--[[jcorneli]] ")
     (insert-utc))
   
   (defun insert-utc ()
     (interactive)
     (insert (format-time-string "%a %b %d %T %Y UTC" nil t)))

If anyone is interested in further details about any of the steps above, just ask. It is my understanding that Mozilla/Firefox also has an extension that can be used to edit wiki pages in the editor of your choice, but I don't recall what this extension is.

It's MozEX but I couldn't find it for the latest versions of firefox. --drini

For the sake of completeness, here is the code for Vim:

    :iab firma  ^O:r!date^M--[[drini]]

where ^O is obtained pressiong Control-V and then Control-O, and ^M is Control-V and then Enter. Thus, anytime the user writes firma it gets expanded as

    --[[drini]] Tue Mar  1 22:32:27 CST 2005

--drini

To leave a message for someone

Just make a note on their user page – they'll see the editing event on the RecentChanges? page and know they have a message waiting.

To make the RecentChanges page load faster

I link to the page that shows just the last day's editing events. This wiki is currently in a state of quick expansion, there are rather a lot of edits each day. The link to the shorter form of the RecentChanges page is given on the main recent changes page, but I'll repeat it here: http://oddwiki.taoriver.net/wiki.pl/AsteroidMeta?action=rc;days=1;all=0;showedit=0

That's all I can think of for now - enjoy - and feel free to add your own tips. --jcorneli Wed Mar 02 01:50:58 2005 UTC

How to add a blank line between indented paragraphs?

At the bottom of the metamathMathQuestions page, I added a long quotation that I want indented, which I accomplished with an ": " before each paragraph. The problem is that the paragraphs don't have a blank line between them, so they seem to merge together, making them hard to distinguish. In fact they can be impossible to distinguish if the paragraph coincidentally ends where the line break would happen anyway. Example:

Indented paragraph 1

Indented paragraph 2

As you see, there is no blank line between the indented paragraphs.

As a workaround, I put an almost-empty paragraph with a period, ": .", between paragraphs, but that looks ugly.

So this is not a tip yet, but a question I hope someone will turn into a tip: how can a blank line be added between indented paragraphs?

--norm 7-Mar-06

If HtmlTags are enabled, you should be able to do a <br/>, but someone would need to turn that feature on. See http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/wiki/HTML

--jcorneli

Yes, that feature could be used to solve the problem, and I hope someone will turn it on.

But there is another puzzle.

On the Usemod Markup Extension instructions page, under "Indented Paragraphs", the example does have a blank line between two successive paragraphs with the same indentation level. If you edit that page and look at the wiki source, the markup is the same as my example above. Why is the behavior different?

--norm

I suggest asking there! Its a wiki, and the admins are very responsive. --jcorneli