Assela Pathirana

Random musings on various topics: Climate and water security, Small Island Developing States (SIDS), IT tools, Computer programming and Web-Applications, Citizen Science, ... Views are personal!

That thing on top left? The two Japanese characters shown in the logo are read as chishiki, they mean knowledge or information. I used this logo originally for my personal desktop wiki based on mediawiki, whose purpose is to keep my information (personal, professional, work, ... everything that can go into a computer) together. So, I thought chishiki is a nice word to describe its function. Then I started to like the logo, so started to use it here as well. The two pairs of square brackets on either side is traditional to wikis, as it indicates the simple syntax for linking between articles in a wiki. The English word seek does not relate directly to the Japanese word, but it represent another important aspect of wiki usage, to help seek knowlege. See here for a larger version of the logo.

What is new Mediawiki for personal webs (22:09, 27 March 2006 (JST)) About Wikis, the site mediawiki says the following: "A wiki is a type of website that allows users to add and edit content easily and is especially suited for collaborative writing." So these packages are meant to be used for sites that are intended for collaboration, probably with contributions from thousands of individuals, like the case of wikipedia. The success of wikipedia shows that this indeed is a workable model. What about using wikimedia for a personal web site. Well, I wanted to do this, mainly because I was lazy, but still needed to boast that I have a personal web site. In late nineties I had a web site. But the main reason why it was not a sustainable project was that it was written using a WYSIWYG software, that makes life extremely easy, the first few times that you work on a new site, but makes it impossibly hard when you want to make a small changes and add a few lines here and there! During my experiments with Wikis (that's another story for another day.) I realized that these Wikis are extremely flexible to grow, although they may have a bit steep learning curve initially. Particularly I liked mediawiki, the software behind the legendary wikipedia. Read More...

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