The Best Wiki Ever: WikiMapia

So I though I realy love WordPress,
But lately I get to see more and more sites based on wiki,
and I’m realy impressed with what wiki apps can offer.

In my post about implementing wiki I have given some samples of regular sites using wiki as their CMS (Content Management System), but this map site i’ve found today is using wiki for a whole new way,
by letting people mark specific spots and locations on a joined map.

Wikimapia

This is the site’s description from its own front page:

WikiMapia is an editable interactive map.
The Goal of Wikimapia is to create and maintain a free,
complete, multilingual, up-to-date map of the whole world.

But i think images will do the work best -
here are a few views you can use to watch a specific area:

The Classic view – with areas marked on the map

In the case of New-York, People have even marked
each building with its name

The wiki has a drop down category list of interesting
views to use

I can choose a close restaurant to go to

Or to create a list of interesting spots by their distance
from each other and plan my visit days by areas

And I can see the exact same category on the regular map view

I’m very pleased with this site, it can help you plan your travels, choose activities by their walking distance from each other, search for shops near by.

and of course – its all updated by the poeple for the poeple.

amazing work, cheers!

Technorati Tags: google, wiki

Free WordPress Theme Builder

This site: http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/ has a simple free wordpress theme builder that anyone can use,
just update the settings via a nice form on the left side,
with the different options like background and sidebars settings,
you can choose if you want a right side bar,
how the left side bar should look, and you can choose which widgets to load to the left side bar.

After you have played with the main look you can generate the files and download a zip file which contains these files:

style.css
reset-fonts-grids-tabs.css
index.php
header.php
footer.php
sidebar.php
comments.php
searchform.php
search.php
archive.php
page.php
functions.php
screenshot.png
images/bg_overlay.png
images/bg_gradient.png

Or you can download each file seperatly.

This gives you the basic structure for a working wordpress theme, from here you only have left to customize as you wish.

Technorati Tags: theme, wordpress

Implementing MediaWiki

My favorite type of wiki is mediawiki,
I love the ease of use, the huge matrix of extensions available,
and the look and feel of the wiki itself.
backup, restore and upgrade support are also very important reasons to choose a specific wiki software,
and having gone through all this steps in mediawiki, I am very pleased with the ease of use.

Starting from the begining:

what is mediawiki?

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It’s designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
Media wiki site

Media wiki also saves the versions of the updated files – allowing for easy reverts and versioning of edited files.

The largest sites using medaiwiki:

Design matters

Wiki website doesn’t have to have the MediaWiki standard look,
you can design the look and feel either manually to suite the corporate guidelines or with existing skins.

Novelle’s wiki site:

marvel.wikia.com:

Extensions

Extensions are compilations of PHP code that add new features or enhance functionality of the main MediaWiki core. Extensions are one of the main advantages of MediaWiki. They give wiki administrators and wiki end-users the ability to adapt MediaWiki to their requirements.

The extensions can add capabilities like:

Embed videos (YouTube)
WhosOnline – shows you who is currently logged in to your wiki
Allow embedded flash
Iframe – to load pages from other site in your wiki page
Convert to pdf
Images preview popup window

Integrate into the Organization

Using LDAP we can integrate the wiki with the main active directory.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Ldap will show you the step to add ldap support to the wiki install,

with ldap you can have single and multi domain authentication (including local database)

Retrieval of user information from LDAP:

Email address
Real name
Nickname
Language

you can configure the wiki to allow to only domain users to access the server, and you can create wikis that will be accessible only by a specific domain group/users.

You can restrict edit access only to users who have created an account AND verified their email address.

more features the mediawiki ofers:

A watch list – update by email when a watched page has changed.
By default, MediaWiki’s page URLs look like /index.php?title=Your_Page,
but an .htaccess file tweak can make them look like Wikipedia’s clean /wiki/Your_Page links.
When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming.

First steps with editing wiki pages

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Editing_overview

This simple editing tutorial will show you the basic step in editing a new wiki page:

headings
lists
links

Technorati Tags: Linux, mediawiki, php, wiki

WordPress Theme – The Loop explained

I’ve been wanting to learn WordPress theme design for a long time now,
but every time I started reading about it I heard the words “The Loop”,
and never understood what are they talking about.

Well finaly I joust found this great intro to wordpress theme writing,
it’s simple, written for beginners, and explains the basics of what blog template writing is all about.

Matt’s post explains what the loop is – which from what i gather – a simple query that collects all the relevant posts to show,after first calling it with the first line:

<?php if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

now you start dropping the other wp blocks into place just like lego:

the title,
the date,
the content

and thats it – now the loop will just drop these 3 again for the next post, until it runs out of posts.

From matt’s post:

There have many concerns and question about the template system used in WordPress. Mostly the concerns are with n00bs and the complications of PHP. “I want to change this and that, but don’t know PHP”. I hear this a lot. But the thing is, you don’t need to know PHP to change the Templates in WordPress.

so thanks Matt for helping me to finally understand what its all about

solaris 10 and vnc

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VNC is a server client method of connecting to a remote server,
the great thing about vnc is that you can see the remote server desktop, and work on it with a mouse just like its your local desktop.
another good thing about vnc is that its free for use for many distros.

There are main 2 major software companies that supply free vnc server and vnc cllient,
the first is realvnc and the second is tightvnc , from the tighvnc site:

TightVNC is a free remote control software package. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer. TightVNC is:

free for both personal and commercial usage, with full source code available (GPL-licensed);
useful in remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes;
cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.

So these are 2 options for you to download a good free vnc viewer.

Solaris VNCserver configuration

and I say only viewer because now the Solaris 10 build 5 comes with the vncserver alredy inside.
all you need to do is to configure it.

This page on the SUN site will give you the detailed explanation on how to do things and what security patch you need to install fisrt ,but the instructions can be summed up in 4 lines:

mkdir -p /etc/dt/config

cp /usr/dt/config/Xservers /etc/dt/config/Xservers

edit this file “/etc/dt/config/Xservers” and add these lines at the end:

:1 Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :1 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
:2 Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :2 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
:3 Local local_uid@none root /usr/X11/bin/Xvnc :3 -nobanner -AlwaysShared -SecurityTypes None -geometry 1024x768x24 -depth 24
And reboot the server.

The lines with the :1 :2 etc at the beginning, are the virtual displays you wish to server to have available for connections, you can add more by changing the numbers to :4 :5 etc.

when connecting to the server with the vnc viewer you need to express to which virtual display you want to connect by adding it to end of the server’s name or ip:

10.10.10.1:3

If you want to connect to virtual display number 3.

A security note – this configuration will allow passwordless access to the vnc screen – if someone logs in and leaves it open – the next user can just enter without a login.

A safer configuration is to require a password by using the -SecurityTypes VncAuth parameter. The Xvnc(1) man page describes password requirements.

VNC and Security

The vnc as a general is clear text, for a more secure connection there is a method of tunneling the vnc through a ssh session.
2 nice tutorials for vnc through ssh can be found here and here.
the second tutorial is using putty for the ssh connection – putty is another great freeware,
its a free ssh client for windows to connect to ssh servers.

If the server you wish to connect to through vnc is located withing your lan,
and you are relaxed about security for the users on it – if its a training server etc ,
you can just setup the vncserver without any safeguards,
but if you are connecting through an unsecured medium (AKA the internet)
you better add the ssh layer to it.

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Technorati Tags: desktop, Linux, network, Solaris, windows

Reading Linux Email book

I’m reading a new book about Linux mail servers,
Its basically a Hands on training book for easily installing a full linux email server for the office,
The book is filled with helping screenshots and a step-by-step procedures to install the server and make things work,
some of the apps the book covers are: Postfix, Courier, Procmail etc…
Ill add a full review when I’m done reading – it looks nice so far.

Technorati Tags: Hardware, Linux, sendmail

I Like Good Linux Lists On The Morning

Lists are the magic word for SEO and link bait, and they catch the eye.

Well I sometimes bite too so here is the latest Linux links list I have fallen for:
15 Power tools for Linux that you cant afford to miss,
I havent checked all the links in the page yet, but I will.

And you should probably check out the whole blog,
It looks very promising and fun to read.
from their description:
Penguin Inside is a blog about Linux and Software Guides, How-TOs, Reviews.
The blog is dedicated to Linux Desktops.

Another Good list is from Smashing Magazine:
50 Beautiful Flash Websites , and thats a beutiful list of 50 stunning flash websites,
A couple that i liked the most are:

e-Content Solutions

econtent

and v5 Design

v5design_s

Technorati Tags: Command line, desktop, Hardware, Linux

Google and SEO: Matt Cutts videos

google_IO_2009

Anybody writing a blog or editing a web site knows the importance of SEO for its search engine ranking, search engine optimization is second in importance to a good page content alone.
The words are arranged in the site, the headlines, the page title, meta tags and other on page elements can affect the site’s search engine ranking and basically – count for how many people will see the page at all.
Like the old saying – Its not just what you say, its how you say it.

And that’s where Matt Cutts comes into the picture,Matt works for Google search engine group for a long while now and has many insights into how Google ranking works and what to do if you want to be part of the top 10.
These are a couple of great videos featuring Matt, where he explains and shows many examples as he reviews specific sites for the good and bad elements in the sites SEO wise.

Another great lecture from Matt, although a little old – and yet still very relevant is the SEO for wordpress lecture which is really worth the time spent listening to,
In his Blog Matt gives many links to those who don’t want to listen the full hour it takes,
starting with the power point from the lecture, through a full transcribe of the talk, and even a shorter summery for the full lecture.

Basically since I have started to follow these guidelines,
my web site traffic has doubled itself and that’s the best incentive I can offer to sit and watch the 2 videos as long as they are, so go on and watch them, you’ll thank me later…

Technorati Tags: google, SEO, wordpress