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Setting Up Confluence - An Enterprise Wiki - On Localhost

Posted Tue, 2009-05-12 22:12 by matthew

The Atlassian site describes Confluence as:

Confluence is a simple, powerful wiki that lets you create and share pages, documents and rich content with your team.

If you're looking for a better way to collaborate or a replacement for an open-source wiki, Confluence has the essential enterprise features for your organisation.

Atlassian will allow you to demo Confluence locally and has set up an all-in-one installation package to simplify setup.  You do, however, have to be at least a little comfortable with command line.

This tutorial reviews setting up Confluence on OSX but should be very similar to setting it up on Linux or on Windows.

Installing MediaWiki on your localhost

Posted Sun, 2009-02-15 15:14 by matthew

I’ve done light exploration of wikis in the past.  These have included:

Recently I downloaded MediaWiki which I’ve loaded up on my localhost.  This little post will review the steps of setting up a local installation on your computer.  MediaWiki is a very powerful opensource software package that was written with internationalization and scalability in mind.  It is licensed under the General Public License and as such is free to download, use, and alter.  The software was originally written by Lee Daniel Crocker.

Downloading MediaWiki and playing with it locally is a great way for nonprofits and individuals to become familiar with this Wiki package and review it’s usefulness.

WikityWidget but only for OS X

Posted Wed, 2007-05-30 04:15 by matthew

Playing with TiddlyWiki has had me thinking more about Wikis as a personal tool. Wikis work as great collaborative documentation builders but at a more compact level, they can act as searchable personal assistants.

WikityWidget is a dashboard based mini-wiki developed for OS X 10.4 by Michael Robinette.

Downloading and installing WikityWidget was simple. I recommend that you use Safari to engage in the download even if you use an alternate browser. The reason is pretty simple--WikityWidget will prompt you to install it in the dashboard--it just makes the process simpler than if you downloaded it from another browser.

TiddlyWiki

Posted Sun, 2007-05-27 16:18 by matthew

TiddlyWiki is an extremely portable Wiki that is easy to install. You download a single file and place it into the directory where you want to access it. You can load it onto a USB drive, a Web server, your desktop, pretty much anywhere.

I've installed it in two places to try it out. First, I put an instance on my iMac. It has been easy to update and load posts to. The second was on my web domain. I've found updating it on my web server is tougher. For the life of me, I can't figure out how to set it up to allow me to write to it.

Web 2.0 and the Arts Challenge

Posted Mon, 2006-11-27 23:48 by matthew

Most arts organizations are non-profits with limited resources. Some are public agencies like city or state run organizations—often low on the funding totem pole. What this means is that resources deployed carefully with little risk. Thoughtful dissemination of money, people, time are essential to protect any non-profit’s investments. While this behaviour can protect what an agency has, it does not encourage risky behaviour.

Ironically the agencies that can most use Web 2.0 are those least capable of deploying such systems.

Web 2.0 is in its infancy. The tools have consistently become better and better over the last three years. To best utilize the tools, you are best off using a variety of different tools as you can embed assets from one set of tools into another through the use of widgets. Widgets allow a user to generate a little chunk of code that can be placed on a page, in a block, on a blog, in a wiki that embed content onto that page.