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So far of all the exercises this is the one I'm the most excited about. It saves so much time and allows me to stay up to date on all my favorite web sites. I get feeds from the The Chronicle of Higher Education, The U.S. Copyright Office, Wilson Stacks Blog, my favorite tech sites and even any updated blogs here on UThink.
Thanks to Dan, Heather and Sue, I got my Jabber account set up and working. I downloaded Pidgin and have that running as I write. It's a very fast and easy way to communicate with someone else.
I set my options in Pidgin to automatically update my status to "unavailable" anytime my mouse and keyboard are inactive for 1 minute. That saves me the time of having to update my status.
I'm all for saving time and I think IM will help do that. It's a lot less time consuming to type a quick question to someone and get their response then it is to call that same person. For one thing, I know they are at their computer, with the phone you have to guess that they are even there.
When playing with wiki's you can choose to create a wiki on pbWiki. http://pbwiki.com/
If you choose to you can share the created pb wiki with the LibLearn team by following the steps below.
I was very excited to figure out how to do this yesterday. I'd read in the wiki documentation that an embedded search was possible and finally had the time to try to do it. It is great, the page will update automatically each time I add another page about processing. Of course I need to follow the topic naming convention I've created.
I wanted a way to break down the four main areas of the reserve manual and create a contents page for each area. The embedded search does that for me because of the consistent topic naming convention I came up with. All topics relating to actual processing steps start with "Proc".
I included an embedded search command on the "Processing Procedures" page. Notice the topic name isn't a WikiWord. There is a way around having to display all the topic titles in wiki word. I enclosed the WikiWord and the text I wanted displayed in brackets like this" [[ProcessingProcedures][Processing Procedures]]. I think it makes it a lot easier for people to find the page they are looking for.
Anyway, back to the embedded search I am so excited about. All the processing topics have Proc at the beginning of the name like this: [[ProcProfsCopy][Creating a record for a professors personal item]]. I used the unique part of the name "Proc" for my search string.
With much trial and error and pouring over documentation I came up with this command -
%SEARCH{type="keyword" "Proc -Processing" scope="topic" casesensitive="on" nosummary="on" nosearch="on"}%
The command produces these results - a nice clean page that is automatically updated anytime I add another page - as long as I follow the naming convention. I can't seem to say enough about the importance of the naming convention. :))
The WebOrder page is used to create a table of contents for the site.
First I created a topic page WebOrder and then linked to the topics in the order I wanted them to appear in the table of contents. I then edited the page where I wanted the table of contents to go and put the Contents command on the page. %CONTENTS%
The percent sign encloses the command. The result is a very nice listing of the topics (pages). I didn't put in the numbers, the wiki software does that for me. Very nice.
After creating the wiki's and reading the documentation I needed to decide how to organize the pages - called "topics" in UMWiki.
There are 4 main areas of focus for the Reserve wiki; General information, Processing, Position information, Aleph information. There also are all the working "cheat sheets".
After much trial and error I came up with a topic naming convention that grouped the topic pages together.
Info, Proc, Res, Aleph and Tips.
None of this happened overnight, more like over months and with much error and restart. The naming convention pays off though as I'm finding out with some of the features of the wiki.
After much poking around the UM wiki website I took the plunge and registered. The next step was to play with my registration page. I then created a wiki for the Circ Department and Reserve Processing and a personal wiki.
I gave the wiki's consistent names so I would be able to find them again. The names are UMDLibCirc and UMDLibCircRes - access to the content is restricted to Circulation staff. My personal wiki is open and can be viewed at https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/MaryCarlson
I've spent most of my wiki play time on the UMDLibCircRes wiki. I did a lot of "playing to figure out how everything works. The biggest hurdle was to wade through the documentation. It got easier once I realized that only a small portion of the documentation is intended for the user. It appears that the documentation for the user and all levels of technical administrators is lumped together. The documentation was a lot easier to understand once I could separate out just the sections I needed.