jac2's dashboard

jac2 reported a problem in PBwiki on October 24, 2008 16:52:

Illegal characters in wiki backup filenames under windows.

Our wiki has a page:
Genuine errors: ‘Payments’ that are not unauthorised payments - HMRC
Winzip complains about the : and the ''s.
Actually if you unzip all you get:
Genuine errors_ GÇÿPaymentsGÇÖ that are not unauthorised payments - HMRC.html
Nice :-)

jac2 shared an idea in PBwiki on October 24, 2008 16:45:

How about e-mailed daily backups?

I just checked with the person who is the wiki evangelist and is supposed to backup whenever big changes are made ..... June :-(

jac2 replied on October 24, 2008 15:57 to the idea "orphaned page report" in PBwiki:

Anyone who wants to try my orphaned page report exe is welcome to try it, I can e-mail the exe over. It is designed for my up-links, but in so doing looks for orphaned pages. You will need to have a backup of the wiki unzipped on your hard disk.

jac2 replied on October 24, 2008 13:24 to the problem "Insert Link Painful for large WIKIs" in PBwiki:

I have written a little application that parses the backups and gets all kinds of information and presents me with a table of contents etc. It also allows me to launch pages of the wiki. What I can't do is from my external editor, copy an internal link and paste it into the wiki editor. If I could do this, my problems would be solved.

Any ideas?

JAC

jac2 replied on October 24, 2008 07:50 to the idea "orphaned page report" in PBwiki:

I have just written a little app that takes a backup file and opens all the pages in the WIKI. At the moment I am using it to build a "table of contents" of the whole wiki. As an aside it manages this as every page has an "up link", linking it to its logical parent page. So be parsing all the pages you can work out a table of contents.

My next step is to extend it to check all links on all pages and add how many pages link to a page.

jac2 replied on October 24, 2008 07:36 to the question "Best way to have a stock of wiki links, say in notepad?" in PBwiki:

Thanks Clif,

I don't want it to track where they have been, just the logical path to the top. The key for me is to be editing a section and have a list of links somewhere (preferably in an external editor) and be able to paste them into an edit session and for them to be internal links in the wiki.

I'll to see what the clipboard format is for the editor.

JAC.

jac2 asked a question in PBwiki on October 23, 2008 16:55:

Best way to have a stock of wiki links, say in notepad?

We have discussed how awkward it is to set links in PBWiki when you have a lot of pages.
I have written a little parser that goes through the backup files and builds a list of pages and their parent pages (we have a standard for "up link"). This gives me a really nice treeview of the whole wiki.

I want to be able to:
1) Paste in a link into the editor that is like a path that the user can click on any link:
frontpage > Using the SIPP System > Tasks > Mine and My group
I have the pages and the linkage, but can't seem to work out what I need to copy to the clipboard to give the the same effect and adding the links manually. I know I could read and re-write the page using the API, but haven't tackled that yet.

If I copy a link in the WIKI (in edit mode) and paste it into another page, it is still a link. If I copy and paste into notepad, it reverts to plain text.

http://xyz.pbwiki.com/page works, but the link is not relative, it is just a completely specified URL link.

I hope that makes sense.

jac2 replied on September 30, 2008 06:53 to the problem "Can't link to local storage" in PBwiki:

I got the details of the registry settings to change to allow for custom handlers like skype: mailto: and was going to write a little app to set up a file: type entry. I think it is a security risk to allow it to open any file, so I was going to make the handler have a "base" directory on the server, e.g. m:\docs\, so that no-one would be able to open c:\windows.........

I'll check out the firefox link though as I use it.

JAC.

jac2 replied on September 08, 2008 08:41 to the problem "Insert Link Painful for large WIKIs" in PBwiki:

Vu, I replied to another entry, after I created this question. Can't find it now. Basically an incremental search, but on any word in the page name. I have a little application that has two boxes, so you can do an and search. As you type into either box, the entries reduce to those that contain the two (or one) strings in the search boxes. I can see without local storage it could be a lot of data, which could slow the list load. I would be happy with:
1) Insert link
2) Screen comes up with a search edit
3) I type in and hit search
4) You get the results as you do with the current search (which is now great)
5) At the top of the results you get a search box to type into
6) As you type, the results further reduce.

This gives you the best of both worlds, the user will intuitively balance performance depending on how many pages are in their wiki (e.g. 5 page wiki, they would just click (2) with no criteria, our 500 page wiki we would type something sensible in to retrieve only 50 rows).

Thanks for your time with this.
JAC

jac2 replied on August 19, 2008 17:48 to the question "Consolidation of "Insert Link" list?" in PBwiki:

I posted another thread before finding this. I thought an edit you type into and it does an incremental match anywhere in the list of pages, so you start with the full list and as you type the list shrinks

jac2 started following the question "Consolidation of "Insert Link" list?" in PBwiki.

jac2 reported a problem in PBwiki on August 19, 2008 17:45:

Insert Link Painful for large WIKIs

Incremental search / Better locate on insert WIKI Link dialogue.
Our WIKI is has 250 pages and I expect it to top 1000 when it is complete, well, when it heads toward maintenance mode. When you click "link" and select "wiki", you get a drop down of all the pages. This is really painful to find the correct page. Being able to do an incremental - match anywhere in the page name, would speed this up and make it a lot less hassle to add links to existing pages.
AFAIK you don't get a well maintained link if you just paste the URL into the edited page.

jac2 reported a problem in PBwiki on June 26, 2008 13:35:

"edit link broken, for everyone, for me" or "My memory is going"

When I right click | Edit Link on a pbwiki link, I am sure it used to show the link dialogue as "wiki link" and the name of the page that the link pointed to, i.e. in the drop down.

Today it appears:
IE7 - like an external URL
Firefox 3- Like a new WIKI page.

Has something changed, was it never like I think it should be, can someone check their V1 WIKI?

jac2 replied on June 21, 2008 09:25 to the question "CSS Editor Changes" in PBwiki:

Vu,
As I should have said, I am not an CSS expert, in fact trying to debug the issue on mine was my 3rd foray into CSS.

See https://vs1.pbwiki.com/common_both-v0...
which I am pretty sure is before my CSS. Notice the "important" overriders. I am right in saying the first one it hits sticks aren't I?

Also see thread: http://getsatisfaction.com/pbwiki/top... toward the bottom.

My advice would be to use firefox + firebug and see what css attributes are being enforced and by which CSS.

jac2 replied on June 20, 2008 09:54 to the question "CSS Editor Changes" in PBwiki:

This sounds like a problem I reported ages ago. It was that somewhere in the nested CSS's used by the developers of PBWIKI they had used an "important" tag, which AFAICS stops the property from being modified by later CSS's. My problem was that I couldn't change "Header1" font size and weight. It worked fine in the CSS editor, but ignored in the live WIKI.

After a lot of digging around and using firebug to work out what effective CSS was actually effecting properties I got to the bottom of it. Reported, but still a problem on our V1 wiki.

Not sure it if is the same, but sounds similiar.

jac2 shared an idea in PBwiki on June 20, 2008 09:48:

Hover over link to get a hint would be really useful.

I want Hints on links.

Our WIKI has three distinct sections, IT techincal, one page per screen, Procedural and Background information. At the top of each page we cross reference, so in a Technical page I will link to relevant Procedure and Background information. Currently we have the text of the link and the link itself.

Wouldn't it be good if we could have a popup hint for the link?

jac2 asked a question in PBwiki on June 06, 2008 09:53:

Seaching multiple words are EXACT matches

Search is like doing a search in quotes on Google?
Unless I am wrong, then this is a hindrance to take up of our business wiki by users. I have just tested v1 & v2. Our problem is that generally we want search results to be weighted:
Exact match (excluding case) (i.e. words appear together and in the same order)
All words appear in title
All words appear in title or text

We can't let Google in as it is a private business wiki and so needs credentials. So am I right, if so, are there any plans to "improve" the search?

The business case is that the WIKI is getting large and users are not finding things quickly, which is reducing the effectiveness and adoption of the WIKI. I had just assumed the search would be Googlesque.

JAC.

jac2 replied on May 31, 2008 12:30 to the idea "No Context (menu's) man! Means no spell check." in PBwiki:

I don't know what spell checker it is, I just looked at my add-ons and it says it is "British English Dictionary V1.19". I would have just gone "Tools | Add-ons" then Get Extensions in Firefox V2.0.0.14. It seems to work in any multi-line edit, not sure about single line edits. On right click on this control (the one I am typing into), I get Undo, copy, paste etc, select all, properties, spell check (checkbox,if checked gives little red dots under words it doesn't like), Inspect Element (Firebug I think) and add-block.

jac2 shared an idea in PBwiki on May 30, 2008 10:18:

No Context (menu's) man! Means no spell check.

I use firefox and as such get a useful set of context menus when I right click on any web control that accepts user input, I get "spell check this control" as one of my options. In V1, as long as you weren't over something special (link / table), you got the context menu. In V2, no menu, so V2 editor is taking control off all right clicks.

Now I may have my own context menu plug-ins written in firefox or whatever, so I should really be able to access them (especially spell checking). If it is that the V2 context menu is taking over, then maybe a button on the toolbar to disable the editor context menus and let the browser ones work (temporarily).

Failure will lead to people realizing how bad my spelling is.

jac2 started following the question "Embedding google maps/other code" in PBwiki.