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Wiki/Pages article ideas

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Of late, I've come across two things that would make great wiki pages.

This thread is mostly for me to keep track of those things to either ultimately write them or ask for them to be written.

Right now, the wiki is in "OK but not great" shape and the long-term 

The first is documenting the RAM speeds in Wombat motherboards.

In particular: What is the RAM speed on the Quadra 800, Q650, and 25/33MHz C650s.

The second is information about booting from USB on PowerPC Macs.

In particular, what models can boot from USB, what OSes can they boot, and if necessary what commands are needed.

Older, but also relevant: Mac hardware and OS disk limit information and testing.

Most of the information is gathered, but it would be nice for it to be a page rather than a post in the middle of a thread.

Added 2019-01-26: What Macs can boot OS 9 (stock/default).

Added 2019-04-04: IIci/IIsi video output system, support for 640x480@60 or no.

I still haven't played with the Pages functionality, but we do have it.

Please feel free to add more ideas especially if you see forum threads that should be captured or rewritten as articles or anything that doesn't exist yet but would be good reference information.

 
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Themk

Well-known member
I will write the RAM speeds in Wombat motherboards.

But, the million dollar question is this: Wiki, or IPBoard Pages.

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
IPBoard Pages is the way to go. I need to speak with ulterior to determine whether we want to make any more changes to the wiki for now or if the best strategy is to just write the info in that thread and transcribe it or promote the post to a page (if possible) later.

 

Themk

Well-known member
Okay, Sounds good. My only concerns have to do with what I outlined in a post I made back in the thread we were discussing RAM speeds in. I can access the pages module, so, it shouldn't be a big deal.

EDIT: Okay, I created a basic article, it seems to have submitted fine. I get a message, however, saying

"The article has been added, however it must be approved before it will be visible".

Let me know how it works out.


 
 

 
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Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I'll have to take a look. It's not "on" and we're not using it right now. I think that a conversation needs to be had (and as of right now I don't know with whom) about what we want "68kmla.org" to look like when people show up. I don't know if we want the forum to appear first or a sort of landing page that shows recent blog/forum/article content, or something else.

 

Themk

Well-known member
 I think that a conversation needs to be had (and as of right now I don't know with whom) about what we want "68kmla.org" to look like when people show up.
It's funny you should mention that, as I was thinking today how 68kmla.org takes you straight to 68kmla.org/forums/. The forums are the main deal of the site at the moment. Yeah, that will be certinally an interesting conversation.

 

IPalindromeI

Well-known member
I think there's bit of an element of the wiki being neglected because of poor integration into the site technically, and socially; this is often because the primary medium for the site becomes the only de facto medium. Even if forum stickies are a bad way to archive info relative to a wiki, people will still use it unless there are governance or social changes.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Yes, there's definitely content in there. A few people have put in articles by mistake, instead of posts in a subforum. I looked at the article you submitted and realize there appears to be no built-in way to handle tables.

This will be a pain if we decide to bother to migrate things like, say, machine data. I'm almost tempted to say we shouldn't bother trying to be a spec database, but it may make sense to have a profile or aggregation page for each machine. (For example, we'd link the Wombat Board Memory Specs page from the C/Q650 and Q800 pages.)

Mediawiki is pretty clearly a better tool, but I'm willing to give up a better tool for something that'll create better culture.

That said -- the copy of IPBoard I downloaded for testing is version 4.2 and we're on version 3 still, so this could all change for the much better once we do that upgrade.

 

Themk

Well-known member
Mediawiki is pretty clearly a better tool, but I'm willing to give up a better tool for something that'll create better culture.
Yeah, I'm not totally sure. There are a few problems with the wiki, first being that there are separate user accounts, making it difficult for many people to access it, that have accounts on the forums side of the thing (such as me). It's pretty removed, you have to click the wiki tab, or type in wiki.68kmla.org manually, but the IPBoard pages module is also pretty far removed, at least the way it's currently configured. I'm not very good with the social aspect of a lot of things, so, I'm not sure how to make it more inclusive with the culture of this website. Maybe there is a plugin for IPBoard that allows for better formatting options. Or, at least, you could allow raw HTML data to be pasted in. At least in that case I could make just a simple table.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Right now, the Invision Pages module is explicitly configured to be hidden or not have anything available. I think the idea is that we're still discussing what's happening.

I was able to get a test Invision 4 installation going on a laptop and I think we should be able to create a home page that has a listing of forums and also a list of, say, recent articles, but I'll look more closely.

Really, the formatting is the big problems.

You discovered that it doesn't make it easy for table data to be put in, and we can't do anything like a page that has its own sidebar, which might be good on a machine aggregation page.

I'll keep looking.

 

jack

Well-known member
I was just thinking, it couldn't hurt to have a retr0bright FAQ on the wiki. It seems questions about it come up a lot around here.

 

Themk

Well-known member
Sure, there is a lot of information that could be added to the Wiki (or whatever they happen to decide to use).

For example, there are a LOT of stickied threads, that would be better off as Wiki articles.

 
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jack

Well-known member
Regarding what could be done for the site & pages, I think that this site could severely benefit from having it's own custom software. There's a number of advantages you could take into account with that:

  • Data export not only from the current site, but also from the stitz archives
  • A LoFi interface accessible, you know, for browsing on old macs (http://lofi.68kmla.org??)
  • A nice custom look
  • Reduced forum spam (since it's a custom interface)
  • Wiki pages, forum all under same account
  • anything our mind imagines
I've been doing quite a bit of web development in Python lately, and would be willing to take on such a project with the help of maybe a few other members. And... if all goes well, we could open source it as a free forum system that does not need crap like PHP (I only get to say this because I've got years of PHP experience, and I still think it's darned awful).

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
The thing I'll say is that we chose our dinner and we're going to be eating it for a few more years. Outside of tables, which there are ways to avoid, the software we are using (and the new versions we have yet to update to) do a really good job at controlling spam, adding functionality under the same account (gallery, for example), and we'd been planning a new theme, but that hasn't happened.

The tables thing is a bit of a bummer, but I don't know if there's anything else that would really have done better. It's not like we could easily have imported the user/post data from phpBB3 to SharePoint. 

The example to look at here is probably Low End Mac. Their page isn't the best, but I think other than as a layout element, they've managed to avoid putting tables anywhere. It'll be annoying, but we can do it.

As far as I know, we don't have the Snitz archives, and another older instance of the phpBB section in an importable database archive, so the situation we have now is probably the best we can do on that front, unless someone wants to hand-type a few ten thousand posts into a forum or database.

 

Themk

Well-known member
As far as I know, we don't have the Snitz archives, and another older instance of the phpBB section in an importable database archive, so the situation we have now is probably the best we can do on that front, unless someone wants to hand-type a few ten thousand posts into a forum or database.
While it's a shame its not an actual breathing Snitz installation, it is a simple HTML dump. The form between the pages is pretty darn similiar, so a program to parse the HTML isn't out of the question. Wget the whole site, figure out the form, parse it into a database, done!

 

jack

Well-known member
^ that's actually what I was implying when I mentioned "import the data". Parsing HTML is quite trivial.

 

Nathan

Well-known member
Honestly I would think a wiki would, in general, be a better choice than making that also depend on the board/forum software which might someday have un-fixable bugs or not provide usable data exports. Especially since a wiki page is really just enhanced HTML for the most part. Although, I'm not really sure what purpose the wiki currently serves, especially when you consider as an example that, aside from archival purposes, everymac.com does a much better job of presenting machine hardware specs. The only really unique content is the tutorial stuff and the notes on scsi harddisk replacements. Also, there are plenty of static and/or dynamic web sites that present tutorial information, etc in somewhat better formats. For better or worse wikis were intended as encyclopedias and they can't necessarily compete with a properly designed site for storing data that isn't quite encyclopedic.  

Tangentially, anyone a fan of Markdown?

 
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