Write On! :: Comments :: Creating and Managing rich backgrounds

So far, my notes are in several places: the books I actually write scenes in, a notepad I carry around in my pocket, my newton, in a directory on my computer, and in my head. It's rather inefficient, and I can't always find things, or find stuff by accident that I had forgotten about.

While I know you weren't trying to convince people that wikis were the way to go, you've still convinced me to move all my stuff to a personal wiki, just so I can actually cross-reference stuff instead of trying to remember how things are related. The only thing that bothers me about wikis is that every time I've looked into setting one up, they ask all kinds of questions about you and what you're going to use it for. Um, pardon? it's GPL, why do they make you jump through those hoops? The one that zonker uses at dissociated press even makes you create an account on their wiki, and only then can you fill out the form to get the source.

Bah. Maybe I'm just too picky about what information I give out. BTW, which wiki do you use?

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?

I use OpenWiki which is written in VBScript/ASP for Microsoft IIS. The machine I use the most is my laptop which runs WinXP so this suits me.

For Unix style boxen have a look at Zope and the ZWiki product. This is what I'm adapting for the Trident Rising site.

Zope in general is a very nice Web application server that can be run stand alone or in conjunction with something like Apache. The language of choice for scripting is Python but it has it's own built in HTML like language called DTML and a nice method of implementing templates for web pages. There are a stack of add-on products to perform just about any activity.

Regs, Gitm
--- This space for rent.
[ Parent ]

...over the weekend.

It has a couple of features that made it perfect for a vague idea I had... specifically, it has a permissions system, so you can make pages and sets of pages read and/or write restricted. I know it's counter to the "WikiCulture", but that's what I wanted - because my idea was to offer wiki-space to people who couldn't install their own so they could sort out their story background out, but I certainly didn't want just anybody reading my story background! So there's public areas and private areas. Basically I wanted it for the easy page creation and cross-referencing, not the collaboration.

By the way, what kind of organisation are you using for your story background? I've got index pages for character, settings, culture, and history, then the details are all in a tangl^H^H^H^H^Hnicely cross-referenced web of pages. I'm kind of curious to know what you did, because I'd like to have a good organisation system. I like being organised...

--
Who needs to be big and burly when you can just apply physics?
[ Parent ]

It sounds like we are doing a similar thing - using a set of nested index pages to manage things by category and letting the Wiki sort out the other inter-relations.

Yes - the cross references become kind of messy - but they always are in real life anyway. I like that though - it can show that things that are completely different on the surface are related through a few levels of indirection. (What was that movie? Seven Degrees of Separation?).

I'm trying to maintain the Encyclopaedia type of top level interface though - plain text search and auto linking lead me to more details.

Regs, Gitm
--- This space for rent.
[ Parent ]

Make a new account