It is for this reason that more attentionis focused on these areas.The Magic of BlogsStudies are showing the increasing popularity of blogs and those who read them. A study by PEWInternet & American Life Project shows that in 2002, only 3% of Internet users owned a blog.

In 2003,that number increased to 5%, and in 2004, that number was up to 7%. Multiply this by the estimated 120 million Internet users in America alone, and that equates to some pretty hefty blogging going on.

Not only are people writing blogs, but more and more people are taking the time to read them. An April 2005 survey by Hostway, Inc. shows that roughly 30% of survey respondents had read blogs, and analysts predict that number will grow greatly in the next few years.

Why Blog?

There are many reasons for blogging, and they run the gamut from personal to political to corporate agendas.

This free, immediate, interactive communication mechanism makes the perfect forum to share opinions and thoughts. Blogs can be about anything, and their informal nature appeals to virtually everyone.

Blogs exist to:

❑ Share political views: Many politicians and high-profile political activists are using blogs to reach the masses and promote their own agendas.

❑ Further corporate goals: Corporations are beginning to jump on the bandwagon and provide blogs about their products and services. Some are written by the consumers themselves. Some corporations are using blogs to notify their loyal readers about upcoming product releases, or other news about the company.

❑ Share personal opinions: On such a crowded planet, and on such a crowded Internet, sometimes people just want to be heard. Maybe they want to share their current experiences with friends and family from across the globe. Or perhaps they have expert advice they want to share with beginners. In a coder’s world, you might have a code snippet to share, or a cool product or link you want to tell others about. The list goes on.

WordPress
WordPress is a great “out of the box” blogging package that provides excellent customizability and functionality. It is available at http://www.wordpress.org.

Installation Notes

Installation of this package is incredibly easy and quick to do. Prior to installation, make sure you are running PHP 4.1+ and MySQL 3.23.23+ and that you have created your database and username/password. The rest of the documentation you would need is conveniently located for you on the http://www.wordpress.org site.

General Overview of Features

WordPress offers numerous functions and areas of customization for your blog, including:

❑ User registration system: Allows you to authorize other users to post, edit, and delete blogs in your site, with 10 levels of varying user access. You can also require an “approval” process before drafts are published.

❑ Static content pages: Allows you add static pages to your site, and manage them through the WordPress interface.

❑ Adding links or blogrolls: You can manage and organize external links through the WordPress interface.

❑ Themes: There are currently 35 themes built-in to the default installation and nearly 150 additional themes available for you through download to easily customize the look and feel of your blog.

❑ Comment system: Allows you to accept, review, and modify comments posted by users and contains a spam blocker to prevent spam posts from popping up. Visitors can also make comments about your blog on their own sites through Trackback and Pingback.

❑ Hidden posts: Allow you to password-protect certain posts that are viewable only by you, or by the author who created them.

❑ Importing data: Allows you to import data from other popular blog packages including MoveableType, Blogger, and numerous others.

❑ RSS feed: Allows others to syndicate your blog.

❑ Post-by-email: Allows you to submit blog posts through the email system.

There are other nice features with this blogging package such as full standards compliance, ease in upgrading, and the use of the Texturize engine to beautify your text from plain ASCII.

Summing It Up

You will find once you delve into the WordPress package that it is well documented, easy to install, easy to configure and customize, and very functional. It also has an excellent support and development community in case you have questions or problems. If you are simply looking to create a blog on your site,
WordPress is hard to beat.

Wiki

Just as programmers, coders, and web developers alike use software to manage development and deployment of software packages, they are turning to wiki to collaborate and create comprehensive documentation to complement those packages.

The Origin of Wiki

According to Wikipedia, the word wiki is based on a Hawaiian term, wiki wiki, meaning “quick or informal,” specifically when referring to the buses at the Honolulu airport. The phrase was coined by Howard (“Ward”) Cunningham back in 1995 as a reference to the Portland Pattern Repository, a collaboration of software development ideas.
As the Internet has grown to reach the masses, the popularity of the wiki concept has grown substantially, particularly in the open source community where many people assume a community responsibility tocontinually improve existing products. Documentation is an integral part of enabling users to understand what an application does or can do.

Wiki sites are not only limited to supporting open source projects, but can also act as a general reference guide for virtually anything. There are hobby-oriented wikis, language wikis, gaming wikis—you could conceivably create a wiki for any topic under the sun.

MediaWiki

One of the more popular packages available, and the brains behind Wikipedia, is MediaWiki. It is available at http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net. The latest release at the time of this writing is 1.4.4 and will be the focus of the discussion here.

Installation Notes

Prior to installing MediaWiki, you should take note of the following: If you have root access, you will not need to create the database pre-installation. If you are installing on a remote server, you will need to create the database yourself before installing.

Also, after the files have been unzipped, you will need to chmod the config directory so that it is writeable. You will also need to reset the permissions upon completion of installation.
The complete installation guide can be found at the MediaWiki Web site:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide:_Installation.

General Overview of Features

Because the purpose of the site is to keep track of a continually evolving body of text, it has some wonderful features for managing users, their input, and version control. General functions available are:

❑ User customization and access: Users can customize their own site interface by editing their own templates, setting their own preferences for things such as time zone and number of results per page. Admins can assign varying levels of permissions to user groups, turning on and off the ability for them to edit, move, contribute, or upload files, among other things.

❑ Search capabilities: Visitors to the site can perform a full-text search of all the articles contained on the site.

❑ Reports: Reports can be generated that provide specific statistics on usage, articles and links, article activity and popularity, images, users, and more.

❑ Editing articles: Users can decide to edit only a portion of an article, articles can be merged if an edit conflict occurs, users can preview their edits before submitting them, and users are given the use of an editing toolbar to facilitate the editing process.

❑ Article organization: Articles can be categorized and subcategorized into unlimited categories.

❑ Text and linking controls: Users can use restricted or full HTML code when submitting text changes or entering new text. Embedded hyperlinks can also be managed.

❑ Watchlist: This feature assists the admin and users in keeping track of users’ edits and contributions. It can show articles of particular interest, recent changes, and which users have contributed the most. This feature even offers a side-by-side view of the article pre- and post-edit with the changes highlighted so changes can be easily identified by the reader.

❑ Multimedia capabilities: Other file types can be uploaded by the user, including images, sound files, mathematical formulas, and charts.

❑ Multilanguage support: Currently, there is support for numerous languages, as well as the ability to link between articles in different languages.
For a complete list of all the functions and features available in this package, visit the MediaWiki Feature List at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_feature_list.

Summing it Up

One only needs to visit Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) to fully grasp all that can be done
with MediaWiki. It is highly functional, customizable, and one of the most robust wiki software packages
available.

DocuWiki

Another Wiki package is DocuWiki, which is available at http://www.splitbrain.org/go/dokuwiki.
What makes this different than other wikis is its use of flat files which releases the user from database dependency.

Installation Notes

DocuWiki is another open source package that offers “out of the box” installation—simply unzip and change permissions to install. The only thing you need to do is create an empty log file per the detailed installation instructions found at http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki%3AInstall.

General Overview of Features

This wiki offers many features including:

❑ Section editing: Allows users to work on only one portion of a page.

❑ Version comparison: Provides colored highlighted differences between two versions of the documents.

❑ User access control: Allows admins to assign permissions to users.

❑ Image uploads: Allows users to include images with the wiki documentation.

❑ Multilanguage support: Provides support for different languages.

❑ Checking in/out: Prevents edit conflicts


Summing It Up

The only thing lacking in this wiki is the database-related functions such as page tracking and referring statistics. It also doesn’t offer a backup utility or allow for user comments on contributions as some other wiki packages do. Otherwise, this is a simple and solid wiki package that is an excellent choice, especially if you don’t have access to a database.