The Longest Now

Zvi has done it again. This time it involves Google Gears, MediaWiki InstaView, and serious sex appeal. Check out gearswiki at theidea.net — you’ll have to have Gears installed; after that, you will be able to visit that url and access your new favorite wiki-reader and thumbwiki even when offline… and you’ll wonder why you ever thought it was the mediawiki rendering that was slow.

Everyone I’ve shown this to is in awe; so you’ll at least enjoy the experience. Go spend two minutes now to check it out. To fully experience the wiki nature, first

• go to the “Dump” button in gearswiki, and follow the link to “MediaWiki dump”.
• this takes you to Wikipedia’s Special:Export … export an XML dump of a category (enter “color” or “languages” into the category box at the top, and the larger textarea will automatically be prefilled with all pages in that category)
• Save the resulting page (as XML, not as a “complete web page”)
• return to gearswiki and upload the XML file you just saved
• explore and enjoy. NB: pages are all editable.