Archives For 13 Feb 2005

MSNBC is running an article that describes how wired phones are increasingly irrelevant to today’s college students. Some colleges are considering getting rid of land lines in campus housing all together with some surprisingly financial implications. At American University:

Five years ago, the school made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on long-distance service, said Carl Whitman, executive director of the Office of Information Technology. Last semester, the school made $1,109.

That’s a pretty dramatic turnaround and it points to the increasingly digital and mobile lifestyle of today’s young people. (Seen on Slashdot.)

Jeremy Zawodny asks Why do Wiki RSS Feeds Suck?

Jeremy’s comment notwithstanding, providing an RSS feed to track changes in a wiki is a great idea, and judging from the comments to Jeremy’s post there are a lot of wiki engines that provide that feature. Some wikis include the full text of the wiki page in the feed, but most seem to show diffs (the “differences” between the original and changed pages). I have noticed that some wikis don’t advertise the presence of the RSS feeds very well (e.g., MediaWiki) so some of you might be missing out on that handy feature. I do wish that there were more RSS feeds available. With MediaWiki, for example, there seems to be a single feed for the entire wiki. I’d like to have a separate feed available for each page or, at the very least, a feed for all of the pages that I’m “watching.”

Wiki shopping guide

13 Feb 2005

I posted last July about the canonical list of wiki engines that is available. The choices are so vast that choosing one can make your head spin. Here’s a little more help for you if you’re shopping for a wiki. The Wiki Choicetree, found at the original wiki site, goes one step further and breaks the list down according to the features of each wiki. This list should help clear up the options a bit.

I’m using MediaWiki (amazing features) and Instiki (dead simple to use) and am liking both of them. You won’t go wrong with either one.