I installed two wiki’s tonight for the first time. What’s a wiki? According to wikipedia…

A wiki is a type of computer software that allows users to easily create, edit and link web pages. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites, power community websites, and are increasingly being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets or for use in Knowledge Management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.

My first wiki can be found at http://wikibooknotes.org.  I plan for this to become a collection of notes I create about books that I find valuable.  The site is still under development but a few pages are up.  The second wiki is at http://music4mass.com/wiki.   I hope this will eventually become a destination for Catholic music ministers looking for help planning music for liturgy.  The wiki will be edited by users and will include suggested songs that fit the readings each Sunday of the liturgical year.

Now for the technical stuff.  WordPress (my blogging platform) and MediaWiki (the wiki platform) are both excellent open source programs.   GoDaddy –my hosting service– makes it relatively easy to set up WordPress blogs in a matter of a few clicks.  MediaWiki’s are a bit more of challenge.   I was fortunate to find Eric Hartwell’s InfoDabble site and his wiki installation article.   If you want to learn more about wiki’s, contribute to one of mine or to wikipedia.  To learn more about blogging, consider setting up a free blog at wordpress.com.

http://www.ehartwell.com/TechNotes/MediaWikiOnGoDaddy.htm

I’ve been using Notepad++ Portable — an open source text editor — for off-line blog post prep. This open source program is available as a Portable app at http:\\portableapps.com. Recently, I’ve been receiving a “config.xml failed” error when loading the app. This was followed by a “stylers.xml failed” error. Notepad++ still worked but the skin changed and settings seemed to be lost. I found the file in the folder \PortableApps\Notepad++Portable\App\Notepad++ and since it had a file length of zero, I assumed it was corrputed. I renamed this file to config.old and that did the trick for both errors. Next time I loaded Notepad++ a new config.xlm file appeared, this one with an 8/16/2007 date. My guess is that when the app doesn’t find the config.xlm file in the appropriate folder, it copies the original from a different folder. I’m not sure how this happened by I’d bet a nickel I yanked out my USB drive before shutting down the app and that corrupted the file. Thanks to Bill Weber for an article that pointed me in the correct direction.