Easy PHP covers all of the installations necessary. Visit their website, as they take the credit for this. There is no need to set up an apache server, SQL database, or PHP 5.

You will find the download here: http://www.easyphp.org/. You will most likely face security warnings because this does involve many program files. Set a restore point and backup files before proceeding. The program will begin running automatically.

This is the desktop icon for version 5.3.6.1. Check the Administration page. This page will display when a working web-server is running.

MediaWiki is a free software open source wiki package written in PHP, originally for use on Wikipedia. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis, including this website, the home of MediaWiki.

Extract Media Wiki using 7-Zip under the “www” folder. The folder will be displayed by EasyPHP in the Administration page. EasyPHP deploys MediaWiki at this point. Under the Root icon, you can find the MediaWiki homepage. Click the icon and the installation wizard will take it from there. If you have disabled the Wizard, re-enable it.

Enable all image uploads if you need to place images. The wizard will create a file titled LocalSettings.php. MediaWiki offers a complete manual to guide you through personal settings. Place this file in the MediaWiki file created earlier. MonoBook comes with MediaWiki and will give you plenty of theme options for the Wiki you want to create.

This next page contains the important user links: “long in/create account,” “edit,” and “Special Pages.” Secure the Wiki by adding the following command to the LocalSettings.php file:

$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;

Go to the edit tab and experiment to learn about what you can do with this. Assign a new account by clicking the link in the upper right corner to create a new user account.

You can use the Special pages link in the other area of the window to create access to various administrative tools for your customized Wiki.

This is a basic set-up and files can be adapted to create preferences for user access. It is a versatile system but it takes some learning. Navigate the options and use the tutorial offered in order to get an overview of the myriad settings you can customize to your specifications. There is a User Import Extension to adapt to user networks and allow other users to utilize this tool for creating Wiki text and images. This can be downloaded under the Extensions folder. Use this for easy Wiki creations. Once you learn the options, this is simple to use for ongoing needs.

Wikipedia has grown over the years. The largest repository on site, the English language version of Wikipedia has broken the 13 Gigabytes barrier lately, and that’s text only. If you add images, you end up at 30+ Gigabytes of space.

Some users may not have Internet access all the time, which means that they cannot access Wikipedia during that time. Maybe you are on Safari in Africa, miles away from the nearest settlement, or on an Island in the Pacific Ocean with less than optimal Internet connections.

I have reviewed quite a few solutions to access Wikipedia without Internet connection. WikiTaxi or Okawix come to mind, or the manual option to install Wikipedia locally.

Okawix has been reviewed before at Ghacks, but that review is two years old. The developers have continuously worked on the application, which justifies another review. Wikipedia in this context refers to all official Wiki projects. This includes Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wikinews.

The program is available for Windows, Mac, Linux and the Android operating system. The Android version has not been available back then, and is one of the core improvements.

The offline reader ships without local Wikipedia databases, which means that you need to download at least one on first run. Databases are available as direct downloads in the program interface, and linked as torrents on the program homepage.

A language screen is displayed if you select to download a Wikipedia database from within the program interface. You need to pick one or multiple languages that you want to download first, and on the second screen one of the available Wikipedia dictionaries or encyclopedias.

The size of each download is displayed on the second page, ranging from less than 100 Megabytes to Gigabytes of data. A click on Download opens a new screen where the installation directory is selected. You can enable image integration which usually increases the size of the download significantly.

The download is then added to the install group on the left sidebar. Already installed Wikis are displayed under the local group.

Installation depends largely on the size of the selected Wiki, and the Internet connection. A progress bar is shown during installation. You can install multiple Wikis at once, but you need to go back to the selection screen after each item that you have added. An option to select multiple Wikis at once would have been handy. The program seems to look up occasionally during installation.

It is usually easier to download the Wikis as torrents. You only need to double-click the downloaded file to add it to the program database, at least that’s the case under Windows.

You can use Wikipedia as you would online once installed, with the exception of account and website related features. You can search Wikipedia for entries, navigate the pages or click on links to be taken to other pages, all without Internet connection

The search is limited to a single Wiki, which you have to select before you begin the search. That’s another aspect that could be better.

The software is generally responsive, but feels heavy at times, especially during installation of Wikis.

Okawix nevertheless makes it relatively easy to download Wikipedia to a local computer system. Interested users find downloads, torrents and documentation on the developer website.

Gnote was cloned from Tomboy (to remove the Mono dependency), is used on the GNOME desktop, and uses a wiki-like interface. Gnote is simple to use and reliable. In this article I am going to introduce you to this tool so that all users of Fedora do not miss out on it’s handiness.

Features

Gnote offers plenty of features for you lovers of the note:

• Auto hyperlinking of matching words in body to note titles.
• Searching.
• Note linking.
• Plugins.
• Styles.
• Bulleted lists.
• Undo.

And plenty more.

Installation

If you are using Fedora 13 you have nothing to do for installation. It’s already there, just waiting on your panel for you to click it and use it. No configuration necessary…just click and use. For those not using Fedora 13 you can install Gnote (so long as you are using GNOME) with a command similar to this:

sudo apt-get install gnote

You can modify the above command to match your distribution. If you’d rather install from source, download the code from the Gnote download page and run the following commands (From within the directory Gnote was downloaded into):

• tar xvzf gnote-XXX.tar.gz (where XXX is the release number).
• cd gnote-XXX (where XXX is the release number).
• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install (NOTE: If do not use sudo, su to the root user first and then run make install).

Once installed you will probably need to add Gnote to your panel.

Usage

Figure 1

There are two ways to open Gnote: Click <Alt>F12 or right-click the panel icon and select Create New Note. When you do this the Gnote window will open to a new note titled New Note * (Where * is a number). You will notice, when you click the panel icon, the menu has a few interesting options (see Figure 1). From here you can quickly access most recent notes, access your notebooks, and search your notes.

Figure 2

When you do open up the Gnotebook main window (see Figure 2) you will see just how simple this tool is to use.

One of the best ways I have found to use Gnote is to first create Notebooks that will organize your notes into categories. Once you’ve done that you can start create notes within each notebook by clicking Gnote Icon > Notebooks > New * note Where * is the title of your notebook.

When you do create new notes, make sure you give that note a good title. Figure 2 shows the title of that particular note being “New Note 4″. That title would be worthless because the changes of me using the text “New Note 4″ in another note is slim. Why is this important? One of the features of Gnote is that when you type text within a note that is the same as the title of another note a hyperlink is automatically generated linking that text to that note. It’s a personal Wiki right on your desktop!

Final thoughts

Gnote is the perfect tool for keeping track of your thoughts and organizing your notes. I have found this tool to be indispensable for work and for home. Give Gnote a try and you might find yourself as dependent upon it as I have.

The US Army’s detention of Bradley Manning was arrested in Kuwait and was “placed in pre-trial confinement for allegedly releasing classified information”.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told the BBC that they could and would not confirm or deny who the source of the original leak was.  ”We do not know if Mr Manning is a source, but we understand there are allegations that are being taken seriously so we are naturally inclined to try to defend [him].”

One video that was put on the website shows a US Apache helicopter killing up to a dozen people, including two journalists, in Baghdad during 2007.  It’s reported that two children were seriously injured in the attack.

It’s been reported that it was a hacker who Mr Manning had contacted who revealed his identity to the US authorities over concerns for US national security and not wanting to be seen to “obstruct justice”.

Wikileaks meanwhile have said that no other potential whistle-blowers should be put off posting to the website, adding that they never divulge their sources.  They added “The site does not collect information about its sources and uses numerous web servers scattered around the world to host content.”

The website was launched in 2006 and built a strong reputation since.  In November 2009 it “published what it said were 573,000 intercepted pager messages sent during the 9/11 attacks in the United States” according to the BBC.

Earlier this year they published a 2008 Pentagon report saying that the site was a “threat to the US Army” though it’s hardly surprising that US authorities wouldn’t like such a website.

Linked Notes is a desktop note taking software for the Windows operating system that combines rich text editing with a wiki style interface.

Information are divided on pages in the software program. Each page is listed in the program’s sidebar for fast access. The note taking software provides access to basic text formatting controls such as changing the font, font weight or adding lists to pages. It is not as sophisticated as a word processing software like Microsoft Word but it makes up for it with speed and accessibility, two features that are usually more important for note taking applications.

It is possible to create a page hierarchy by right-clicking on available pages and selecting the outline option to link pages with each other.

Most of the program’s features can be controlled with keyboard shortcuts. This includes creating, printing or saving new notes, applying formatting or searching through the notes. Notes can be exported as plain text or rich text documents.

A pro version of Linked Notes is available as well which adds encryption, screen capturing, identities that are allowed to access the application and multi-page exports into a single rtf file.

Linked Notes is an interesting option for users who want an organized note taking application with basic text formatting features. The program can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It should run on most Windows operating system and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5.

One of the first things to come out of the Usability Project was a new skin. Wikipedia currently uses a skin called Monobook and has done so for over five years. Since Monobook was chosen, design trends have changed, as have web browsers and the way in which we surf.

The skin, called Vector, makes a number of changes. Vector gives the searchbar a more prominent location, declutters pages and looks much more modern. Basically, it makes it much easier to browse Wikipedia.

Registered users can choose a variety of skins and ‘gadgets’.

To enable the Vector skin, registered users need only go to the ‘Appearance’ tab in the ‘My Preferences‘ page and select Vector.

The usability project has many other plans, and aims to make editing more accessible. This is just a first step, but in my opinion still a marked difference.

TiddlyWiki is one such wiki, which you can download as a single file to your hard drive, or your can host it online using TiddlySpot. I recommend you visit the site and download a copy for yourself, there are easy to follow instructions, and no real set up is required.

To organize your notes you can use tags, and the whole database is easily searchable from the search box at the top. For example, I usually think up my designs as a single HTML page, without any PHP, just laying out the design. Depending on the general structure of the design I have a few templates at the ready, all in my trusty wiki. To get the one I use for a “content on the left, sidebar on the right” layout I just type “template sidebar right”, and the first note will be the one containing this layout, I can just copy paste the code into my file.

There are a number of other uses you can put your Wiki to of course. If you’re learning to code, you can simply copy the snippets you find and you want to study, and tag them by language, for future reference. You can also store some helpful links, ideas, project plans and so on.

You can use this is a regular notebook too, the real use of a Wiki is that it is very unobtrusive. You can use the same file for your personal notes, your diary and your coding organizer. Since you can use tags and search, you can display only the tiddlers (or notes) you want, so your coding stuff doesn’t have to get in the way of your other notes.

The see the power of a Wiki you really have to take a look yourself, so head on over to TiddlyWiki and grab yourself a copy. Wikis are not everyone’s cup of tea though, so you may not like it as much, but it is a bit different than most systems so give it a chance, try forcing yourself to use if for a week or two, you’ll definitely see the benefits.

If you’d like to get some more tips and tricks for web development and specific languages like HTML, CSS, PHP and the rest, head on down to Scriptastique for yumm coding treats!

• Get course information
• Contact the instructor
• Read or download lecture notes
• Get assignments
• Ask questions and get answers
• Communicate with other students

CourseForum is incredibly easy to “install” on Linux, Windows, Mac,? FreeBSD, or Solaris and can be accessed from any web browser. Let’s take a look at this classroom software from the Linux point of view.

Getting and Installing

Since CourseForum even has its own server built in you can install CourseForum anywhere on a Linux machine. CourseForum comes in a single executable binary that starts and runs CourseForum on port 3455. So after you download the demo follow these steps (as either the root user or using sudo):

Untar the package into your servers’ document root (i.e. /var/www/html for Fedora /var/www in Ubuntu)

Change into the newly created directory (courseforum-linux) and issue the command:

./courseforum &

The CourseForum daemon will start and you can now point your browser to:

http://IP_OR_DOMAIN:3445

Where IP_OR_DOMAIN is either the IP address or domain the server is on.

CourseForum Admin Page

This address will take you to the front page of CourseForum. The first thing you will need to do (before you can do anything else) is set an administrative password. Once you do that you can access the administration page and start building your course. NOTE: The demo is restricted to only a single course. If you purchase the full version you can create unlimited courses.

As you can see (in the image to the left) all administration tasks are taken care of in one window. There isn’t a lot of admin work to do with this software which makes it an even better solution for busy instructors.

Some of the more important tasks your instructors will want to do are:

• Messages: This is really just the welcome message displayed on the front page of CourseForum.
• Custom Links: This isn’t really what it sounds like. What this feature does is allow you to create custom? commands that can do any number of things like formatting or integrating third-party content. There is a good how-to page on the CourseForum site to illustrate how these are created.
• RSS/Email Notification: If you want to enable RSS feeds and/or email notification on your CourseForum site you will have to enter the information for your SMTP server here.
• Web Views: This allows you to create a read-only version of the CourseForum. Since the basis of CourseForum is a wiki, any registered user will be able to edit pages, so you will want to be ablel to serve up versions of pages (such as Syllaubus, lectures, etc) that are read-only for the public to view.

There is one administrative task I would highly recommend. When you create a new course you will have to administer that course independently of the site administration (In other words it has its own admin page). Within the course administration page you will want to take care of at least two things:

• Check the “Only course administrator can create projects” check box.
• Under the Require Password dropdown select “To edit pages” otherwise any registered user can edit your course pages.

And that’s pretty much it. The rest of the tool works like a standard Wiki page.

Final Thoughts

If you have been looking for a tool to allow students (of any type) to not only stay current in your classroom but also be able to interact, CourseForum might very well be the solution for you. I have deployed it for a few teachers who have been very pleased with the results. It’s remarkably seasy to install, simple to use, reliable, and it’s a fairly cheap solution ($119.00 USD).

Wikipedia has enabled the ‘Book’ extension to MediaWiki, the content management system it utilises. This adds a ‘add page’ link to every page, allowing users to compile a book. This book can then be sorted by the user into chapters. Afterwards, it can be shared with other Wikipedians. Currently, only logged-in users can utilise this tool.

Wikipedia has a built-in rendering engine which will grabs the pages, fetches the images and parses them before they are given to the user as a PDF or OpenDocument text. The user can also use PediaPress to have the book professionally bound and printed.

The ‘Book’ extension has a number of features for ‘expert’ users. For example, the user can elect to only include a certain version of an article. This could pose useful if the article being covered has reached ‘Featured’ or ‘Good’ quality, as they are sure information in the version which reached that standard is reliable and accurate.

Books can be made on any topic, or combinations of topics, on Wikipedia (or other projects with have enabled this extension, such as Wikibooks). There are some restrictions on what can be printed, as PediaPress are based in Germany so German law applies.

It is an amazing display of quite how big Wikipedia is. I made a book about the European Union, comprising about 45 articles, and when I sent it to PediaPress, it totalled a massive 2444 pages (3 volumes!). I shan’t be buying this, as it will cost me about €80! Prices for smaller books start at $8.90 for 100 pages. A fraction of this is donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. These books are black and white and measure 8″ x 5.5″ (about 20cmx14cm).

The books (from the preview I’ve seen) and the PDFs are well laid out. The PDFs are all selectable and are easy to navigate. It also contains links to the images’ pages. Amusingly, to maintain GFDL compatibility every editor to the article has to be mentioned! I, for example, are credited for writing a minute amount of the article on the Czech Republic.

I question how popular this will be though; as convenient as books may be, I would imagine institutions like schools would rather buy published textbooks than volunteer made ones.

It is worth emphasising that Wikibooks contains resources written as textbook entries, rather than articles. Perhaps that will be a practical application of PediaPress and this new move.

More information is available on the Wikpedia help page.

TechCrunch has also covered this story, but I simply found it through browsing Wikipedia!

The most useful tool to improve the browsing of Wikipedia has to be Navigational Pop-Ups. This is a Wikipedia userscript which allows the user to preview an article by hovering their mouse over a link to it; the userscript provides the first few paragraphs of an article as well as an image. The benefit of this is you can quickly understand a technical term linked to inside Wikipedia, preventing another tab from having to be opened. Popups provides a quick way for edits to be reverted (restored to a previous version). To install Popups, one must simply go to ‘Gadgets’ under ‘My Preferences’ whilst logged in and enable it.

The recent Wikipedia censorship controversy led to editors finding workarounds so they could continue to use Wikipedia. One way was to use Wikimedia’s SSL server to access Wikipedia, ensuring pages cannot be censored or edits recorded which obviously has benefits in environments like the workplace. The URL of the SSL server is https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ (to use a different language/project, change Wikipedia to the other project, eg wikinews; or en to your language, eg de.

The Watchlist is another powerful tool built into Wikipedia. It allows you to select pages in which you have a special interest and a list is then generated of them with any edits to those pages being highlighted. To start watching a page, one must simply click ‘watch’ at the top of the page and to view it click ‘my watchlist’. Even if you don’t utilise it to monitor changes, it can act as a bookmarking tool for Wikipedia!

Directed Edge Encyclopedia is a website based on Wikipedia which adds ‘related articles’ to articles; useful to get background knowledge on a topic! One can include these in Wikipedia by going to their monobook.js page whilst logged in, pressing ‘edit’ and pasting the following:


document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scott.wheeler/relatedarticles.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"></script>');


A list of other cool scripts which can be installed is listed here.

Any media, whether that be music, a video or an image, on Wikimedia Commons can be commercially re-used and generally speaking the only major licensing limitation is that credit may have to be provided to the creator and copyright holder, if any.

Wikimedia Commons has some amazing photography and has many useful illustrations, such as maps and diagrams. The vast majority of images on the site are categorised extremely well, and they can either be browsed through the categories or use the substandard search tool available.

Many public domain recordings are on Wikimedia Commons and there’s a wide range of classical music and opera available for download. All audio/visual media is stored in the form of OGG files, which may have to be converted before use, but will be natively supported in future versions of Firefox. Some visual recordings, such as that of “The Spirit of St. Louis”, are also available.

Most media on Wikimedia Commons are either public domain, Creative Commons, under the GFDL or licensed under another free licence, which makes it suitable for re-use.

© Goran Andjelic under the GFDL.

The main difference between Google Sites and a Wiki is that Sites is tailored very well to a domain. This means that while Wikis tend to be community pages only, with sites you can restrict who is able to do what right down to picking out your Google Apps users. This gives great control over who can do what with the site. For example I use Google Sites for my blog management service Blogtastique, to give customers a cool way to follow what’s going on with their order. I can creqate file repositories, announcement boards, order detail pages. I can also only share the page with the specific customer, so noone else can take a peak into his or her order. The users can also upload files and share their comments, which make for a very rich user experience.

Pages are very easily editable using the type of rich text editor we all know from our Gmail interfaces. Just click edit, start typing, save, and you have your page. You can change the look of your site quite easily with the built in templates, or you can customize one for yourself. Customization is a bit limited, but flexible enough for most purposes. It doesn’t work by modifying css, which means you can’t do anything, but there are enough variables you can modify to dramatically change everything.

There are also some widgets you can place on pages like a timer, a changes tracking module, but the selection here is still a bit limited. In fact, all the shortcommings of Sites is because it is not yet tailored to power users. Development is in progress and they are gradually implementing things, but a lot of work needs to be done to make it as flexible as it could be. To mention just some of the shortcommings, there is no site duplication. So if I spend 10 minutes setting up a page for a client, I need to spend another ten for the next, I can’t just copy and change the name, while this is essentially what needs to be done. The user roles are not well implemented. Separating people who can and can’t view the page is easy and well done, but there is no option for a commenter only. This means that a person can either just view the page and not do anything, or he/she can modify the page and comment. It would be nice to have a role where someone can view but not modify, and be able to comment.

Overall, I suggest trying out this application because it is easy to use and can be used for a multitude of things. It still has some problems, but knowing Google, they will be addressed sooner or later. I don’t know how high up this is on the company’s agenda, so we may still have to wait a bit, but I like how things are shaping up!