A Wiki

June 21, 2006 at 5:41 pm | In wiki_victoria | 1 Comment

I just started a wiki — my first ever. I don’t know whether I will continue it, or whether it will fade away, but it’s focussed on Victoria, BC (where I live), specifically its urban development aspects. Blame WetPaint — couldn’t resist starting this up.

I’m actually trying to write something marginally serious about architecture (specifically here, in Victoria), but I’m afraid that my 3 years of writing online have retarded my abilities: I feel more comfortable writing text that will show up as email or on some webpage — the others feel dead somehow. Oh dear. Is it legit to write drafts of one’s essays or articles on wikis first? 😉

So, my wiki is called Victoria City Style Council, and the “home” or “welcome” page explains some of that. The key piece that got me started was reading Stephen Miller’s Conversation; A History of a Declining Art. The result was the Style v. Substance piece, s.v. “Welcome.”

Transfer complete, Missing in Action: 1; Last Update: 1

June 6, 2006 at 3:15 pm | In Uncategorized | 3 Comments

The entry I wrote the other day, when I briefly woke my old blog from months-long slumber, on which Melanie from way down under left a lovely comment, didn’t make the transition. For some reason it was …abbreviated. That’s ok: it was all about how I’m not blogging anymore, and won’t be in the future. But it was a blog entry, no? (*)

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This is starting to sound like a logic puzzle!

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(*) That June 4 entry, the first since February, was, first, a thank you to all of you who wrote to say that you missed my blog, followed by a brief explanation of why I stopped blogging, and somewhat convoluted explanation of why I woke the old blog up: basically that I learned that Harvard blogs was switching from Manila to WordPress, that one could keep one’s old blog on Manila, but that there’d be no guarantee that the Manila server would be maintained. Now, I have a lot of content on this blog, which I do have in various documents on various computers. But as a user of writely.com and other web-based applications, I do also like having my content accessible via a browser. So… I decided to “wake” the old blog, and attempt a transfer to WordPress.

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Now the old blog is transferred, and I can keep it on the new server for future use. I might have to “lock” it again, though, since I can see all sorts of weird links in the new sidebar that shouldn’t be there: 2 “about” pages (the first is empty, the second used to appear on the sidebar in the old blog), links to stories that shouldn’t be linked to in the sidebar (can’t figure that one out), and I notice, too, that all my paragraph breaks are gone, making my texts look like Peter Weiss’s Aesthetic of Resistance (but not reading as finely!) … oh well. (*)

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(*) I deleted the “empty” about page. But the other stuff is still there, inappropriately, and without paragraph breaks.

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One last thing before I go (really…). (*)

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(*) In the entry that didn’t make the transition to the new server, I noted that I was not re-starting blogging. This is just a weird …hiccup.

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I have some invitations (free) to diigo — if you want one, leave me a comment (or send me email – yheibel AT post DOT harvard DOT edu). I highly recommend this service to anybody who does a lot of online research and needs to annotate the texts for future reference. You can also add your annotations (like “sticky” notes in flickr) to images, so it’s quite handy for visual research, too. You can keep your links entirely private (i.e., what you bookmark and annotate won’t be seen by anyone else), or you can make it public. You can also use diigo to blog annotations (i.e., highlighted bits and whatever comment you added), so…

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I made a couple of my bookmarks public, just to give you an idea. They’re on this page. Note that the annotations can be expanded, so you can see at a glance what was signficant (in this case to me) in the article, and seeing your notes on it will jog your memory as to what you intended to use that particular text for. Incredibly useful, IMO.

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Unlike this blog, which I just wasted ages on updating with links. What a time sink! Better to do online research.

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