PBwiki’s really simple, and that’s great, but sometimes, it lets us forget that we’re not only PBwiki users interacting in a peanutty-licious microcosm; instead, we’re webmasters and content creators in our own right, in a vast world full of others who may or may not be PBwiki users. The Internet, with us all involved, is a giant community, and in any community, there are certain expected behaviors that allow us to interact in a meaningful manner with our neighbors.

These behaviors form a few guidelines for basic etiquette in website design and content that apply to everything from Joe’s Vacation Journal Wiki to Giganto Corporate Wiki. I’ll just list them first before discussing them in more detail:

1. DO NOT link to other’s files and images without permission
2. Using content or designs without permission is BAD
3. DO link to other webpages to give credit
4. Big images are BAD
5. Really long pages for no reason are BAD

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Sometimes you might be inclined to look at your address bar and wonder what PBwiki is up to. What’s all this “?edit=1″ and “?raw=1″ nonsense you see hanging off the end of your wiki names? More importantly, can YOU do anything interesting with them?

Well, of course the answer is yes, they can be useful to you; otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this entry. Each of those examples represents parameters that are passed to PBwiki so that the computers on their end can know what page to fetch and send back to you. For a non-PBwiki example, when you do a search in Google, the search term is included in the address of the next page you request, and that information is used by Google’s servers to search their database for your information.

Similarly, when “?edit=1″ is set on PBwiki, it says “send me the edit-mode version of this page.” You can use parameters like this one to help make navigating your site easier…

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As PBwiki becomes a more unified and simple-to-use product, it naturally grows outside of the scope of tech-junkies and computer-geeks, creating a target audience that includes everyone from SUPAH L33T TECHNO-DWEEB’s like me to somebody’s grandma trying to share her latest knitted masterpiece. Therefore, today I address five of the beginner questions I’ve seen most recently in the PBwiki forums and elsewhere. Even though many of these questions are basic for some of you, remember that everybody has to start somewhere, even when making a peanut-butter sandwich.

(For friends who are further along, I ask that you wait patiently until tomorrow, when I’ll put up something more to your tastes…Thanks!)

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Hey folks! Sorry it’s been so long since the last update, I just got back from a trip to London and now it’s back to the real world for little ol’ me. I hope everybody has been well and is ready to jump in with some more PBwiki tips…

In the past week or two, I’ve seen a lot of questions from users on the forums about how to link from one page to another, link to somebody’s e-mail address, or to do special things like open in a new window or break out of frames. Those options are all available for folks in both the Classic WikiStyle Editor and the newer Point and Click Editor.

First off, we’ll briefly review links in general for our newest users…

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Ocassionally, our pages mess up because of a PBwiki bug. If that’s the case, then of course you should let somebody at support@pbwiki.com know and they’ll help you get things back to normal. However, a lot of cases are our own doing, and it is sometimes frustrating to see our pages look like a wreck for a few hours while we wait for support’s answer, no matter how prompt it might be.

Below, I’m going to show you a few tips you can use to take your wiki into your own hands when a boo-boo comes along. Support is of course always available either officially through support@pbwiki.com or by users like you through the forums, but a couple steps towards independence can be a welcome skill for any user.

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Author’s Note: Wordpress garbled my code at the bottom of this page for the auto-generated index. It’s fixed now (April 5, 2007).

Celebrating National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day really gave me a moment to pause and reflect on the core concepts of PBwiki. Like a PBJ sandwich, PBwiki is about solid, satisfying simplicity, and sometimes, I think I forget that, looking for the filet mignon of the wiki world. Sure, it’s natural: I was originally brought on to the crew as a “Javascript Hacker.” I spend my free time doing silly things like making Tetris run in my wiki (programmed from scratch, FYI). Sometimes, the basic wiki stuff just gets lost on me.

To refocus, I’ve decided that about every other TOTW entry will be aimed primarily at hitting some foundational aspect of the PBwiki concept, which will be useful for our newer users and maybe a few veterans as well. Today, I’m gonna begin with ideas for navigating and finding pages in your wiki...

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I’m a little bit late with this post, but should be back on track this week. Last time, we discussed how to create a PBwiki Identity. Now, we’re gonna take a look at how to best use Identities for two aspects of wiki management, handling multiple wikis with one account and controlling access to a wiki on a per-user basis.

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Last year, PBwiki rolled out a neat new feature called PBwiki Identities. The general idea was that PBwiki users within the system would be treated as individuals rather than being connected to a specific wiki. This way, a user could manage multiple wikis without keeping track of all the passwords (there was also more control in wiki-administration).

As a quick note, a PBwiki Identity password is COMPLETELY separate from the password of any wiki you may have created. Here’s the order of how things should usually happen:

1. You create a new wiki, let’s say it’s at totallysweet.pbwiki.com (as of this entry, that wiki is up for grabs, just so you know). Furthermore, we’ll say that the password is abc123.
2. You start contributing in a few wikis, and you hate logging in to each one separately. So you go to http://my.pbwiki.com and create an Identity. Your Identity email is coolguy@someISP.com and your password is zyx987.
3. You enter your Identity page and enter the names and passwords for all the wikis in which you participate. In this case, you would put totallysweet for the wiki name and abc123 for the wiki-wide password.
   1. Alternately, somebody might invite you to participate in his/her wiki, to which you’ll be added as soon as you approve (by e-mail link). In this case, no password will exchange hands.
4. Now, you can login to all your wikis at one time just by going to my.pbwiki.com and logging in to your Identity with your email address (coolguy@someISP.com) and the password zyx987. Note that from this point on, you won’t need to login to totallysweet.pbwiki.com separately, nor do you need to use its specific password, abc123. You will also be automatically logged in to any wikis to which you were officially invited. Awesome huh?

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Jason Nguyen

Last week, I gave you some ideas to start optimizing your images for web upload, looking at file size and compression type (JPEG or GIF). This time, we assume that you have your file created and uploaded, and we begin to explore the various ways you can present that image in a page, focusing on alignment and borders.

This week, Oscar the Panda is on vacation, so I have Slippy here as my assistant. Say hi to Slippy!

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Jason Nguyen

Anybody who designs a website, be it a wiki or any other kind of site, will eventually come to realize that an all-text site is one of the most boring things ever, and although some of that is helped with some well-placed colors and styles, you’ll eventually need some images to spice things up.

PBwiki makes the image upload process very easy, and the basic layout options are simple. However, before we even begin the layout process, the first step to making optimum images begins well in advance. This week, we’ll take a look at how to prep your images before you upload them, and next week, we’ll discover some neat ways to present them in your wiki.

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