The Invisible Wiki

Everyone knows what a wiki looks like: Wikipedia, right?

And everyone knows what a wiki is for: letting anyone contribute, right?

Well, not necessarily. A wiki engine (the software used to create and run wikis like Wikipedia) doesn’t actually care if you use it to make a “proper” wiki or not. 

In fact, since wiki engines allow some users access to edit pages and stop others, what if you only allowed yourself access? Do you then still have a wiki? Or just a really easy-to-edit web site? One that you can edit from anywhere you can get to the internet?

But what about the plain-vanilla wiki look? What about the history/revision links, last edit information, and all the other clues that the user is looking at a wiki engine? 

Enter our friend the CSS stylesheet, and one of our favorite commands,

{display:none;}

Voila! Restrict access and hide the wiki features, and you have an easy-to-edit, open-source-powered web site. A few examples:

http://www.yanb.be
http://www.ifccc.org
http://nitens.org/taraborelli

OK, so they still look pretty plain, but they certainly don’t look like wikis. And with some CSS trickery, they can look like anything you want.

A wiki engine is simply that: an engine. And like any engine, it provides power; what you do with it is only limited by your ideas.

Here’s a quick tutorial to get started (specifically using the Wikka engine, but the concepts involved will work with most others):

http://docs.wikkawiki.org/InvisibleWiki

And a quick video tutorial:

How to run an invisible wiki from AcademicProductivity on Vimeo

How to Back Up your Site in cPanel (Video Tutorial)

Here’s a quick video tutorial on backing up your self-hosted blog or website using the cPanel administration interface.

Required:

Hosting account with cPanel interface

Optional:

Addition FTP server for remote backup

YouTube made it a bit fuzzy, so I recommend full-screen viewing. If anyone has tips for getting YouTube to display closer to the original quality, please leave a comment below. Update: I’ve switched to Vimeo – the quality is considerably better.

How to Back Up your Site in cPanel from The Agitationist on Vimeo.

Tumblr Updates to v.5, Gets New Features

Via Mashable/Vimeo:

A great-looking update to a service I’ve raved about:

Tumblr v5 “Sexy As Hell”

January 16, 2009 – 11:11 am PDT – by Pete Cashmore

The changes have been universally welcomed by Tumblr’s self-reported 625,000 account holders, and we see them as a welcome upgrade to an already enjoyable service.

Blogging service Tumblr launched its fifth version today, with features including a revised Dashboard (Tumblr’s take on a RSS reader), a directory, a theme garden and a new version of its Goodies pages (where users find extra features like the iPhone app and Dashboard widget). It is, claims founder David Karp in the video below, “sexy as hell”.  

Perhaps most interesting: a complete revision of its Radar page, a novel way to find hot content that shirks the obvious “Digg like” interface for a more inventive grid layout.

Introducing: Tumblr v5 from David Karp on Vimeo.