Just upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.  Each release seems to come on leaps and bounds.  The new admin interface is fantastic, usable and feature rich.

The ability to automatically upgrade plugins, and to newer versions of wordpress once their released is a brilliant addition, meaning maintainence of the system is now a doddle.

The inclusion of a fair swaith of jQuery helps keep the interface smooth, the code small and compatible across all the browsers.

It’s a very impressive release!

Keep up the good work guys!

Sites like Wikipedia have had a meteoric rise to fame (and potential fortune) over the last few years. There was a time when a random question was answered with a plain “I have no idea” now it’s generally a question of who can type in www.wikipedia.com the fastest.

In some ways, the prominence of Wikipedia has almost “sullied” the concept of a wiki. When someone says “wiki” it’s the first example that springs to mind, with all of the baggage that accompanies it. Some see Wikipedia as a resource of knowledge, others as a chaotic tangle of mis-truths and flame wars. Some of the fairly recent press on Wikipedia hasn’t helped this image.

This prejudice towards wikipedia spills out onto wiki’s in general, which has made selling the concept of a wiki to the corporate world something of a challenge.

Wiki’s allow communities of people to share knowledge and experience on relevant topics in a structured yet flexible manner.  In order to leverage the power of this collaborative resource, a level or order must be imposed on the evolution of a wiki.  Wikipedia benefits from a core group of dedicated administrators policing the site, re-writing, linking and trimming the articles entered from the collective conscious of the internet.  In a corporate environment where resources (people) are more limited in the time they can spend enforcing structure, sections of the wiki need to be organised in a consistent and logical manner.

Companies can greatly benefit from the wiki concepts.  Corporate Wiki’s can become vast stores of knowledge, all interlinked from article to article, allowing a user reading the policy regarding the Disaster Recovery policy immediate links to related pages on back-up procedures or fire regulations, etc.  Were these documents each stored in a static Word document, it would increase complexity.

When looking for advice on introducing a wiki into the business world, I trawled the web looking for some kind of “best practice” which would help me to define a structure and hierarchy which would encourage use and growth in a scalable and maintainable way.  The best resource I discovered in this capacity was WikiPatterns, an excellent resource of Patterns and Anti-Patterns, how you can get the best use out of them, or solve their issues as they arise.

I am currently working on a project to implement the Confluence wiki from Atlassian.  This is a Java based, fully supported enterprise level wiki.  In my own webspace, I plan to use MediaWiki, the open source wiki behind Wikipedia.

I’ve added a page showing pictures from my Flickr account.  Mainly as a quick proof of concept of integrating Flickr with Wordpress.

Web development sites are ten a penny, but A List Apart is one of the best resources on the net. Great articles on standards, design, freelancing and technical crunch.

To go alongside a fantastic colour scheme (check out the post on Adobe Kuler) I love the idea of coming up with a design using a great looking font.  With the theme I’m using at the moment “Word to your mother” I was obviously in a hip-hop mood, so I ended up using some great graffiti fonts.

Well, I tracked those fonts down through a couple of freeware font sites, a great example of which is Fonts 500. Five pages, each with 100 fonts on, taken from the popular downloads of a selection of other font sites.
Great stuff.

XAMPP is a great tool for web development. Its basically a complete web server environment, well, Apache, MySQL and PHP, so all the important stuff. If you need a Java Enterprise environment, there’s even a Tomcat plugin for it. Best of all, it fits on a USB key and can run straight from there, making it your own portable server, great for demoing that “Work in progress” web application.

When I’m looking for inspiration for making a site, an appropriate colour scheme can really help. That’s where Adobe Kuler comes in, a flash based “Web 2.0″ application that brings a community of designers
together, all contributing interesting colour combination’s.

Since setting up the new website, I’ve been loving the WordPress system.

I used to use Blogger, the Google powered blog site, but WordPress seems to offer so much more functionality.  The ability to use it as a back end system with front end customisations to generate any site you can think of is very powerful.  I’m looking forward to working on the Maydays new site using it.