Brad’s Ve-learning project

Theoretically the formal part of the project comes to an end, though I am sure it will continue for a while yet.

A few thoughts…

Have had a better look at Wordpress blog functionality & customisability.  It looks very impressive, had I more time to spare for playing.  Have installed the plugin for Flickr, which enabled the drag /drop exercise in an earlier post.  Also made use of the Blogroll feature to add some of the blogsreferred to herein.

Would also be interested in looking at VOX in more detail.  The more you learn, the more something else interesting comes along…

The Wikispaces wiki seems to work pretty well, but is inadequate for our needs.  The formatting quirks will make it easier for someone to cause problems in there, or leave frustrated.  At present the advertising would also not be acceptable.

As suggested earlier, our own hosted wiki with our badging & increased functionality would be the go.  Anne Bartlett-Braggs suggested that Confluence http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/ was a wiki “to die for”, & while I’ve never felt quite that enthusiastic (& a lot of people seem to die for a lot less), I would certainly like to give it a try.  Apparently, make the most of the plug-ins.

Thought Google Docs or Zoho Writer with multiple user access & ‘publish’ option might be another alternative for the links, but am not happy about a URL that crosses half the country.

Back to Horticulture…  Spent much of the day working on the wiki, seeing how the links work out.  As with pb, I also ran into a few formatting problems with Wikispaces.  There is limited functionality as far as I can see.  My attempts to remove underlines & links kept failing to be accepted.   As an HTML novice, the easiest solution was to clear the section & format it in Word, then cut & paste.  It worked, but I am concerned that attempts at changes could result in unintended consequences.

As noted, there are numerous wikis around, & we basically wanted something free, hosted & relatively WYSIWYG.   Ultimately, looking at the offerings, it would be preferable to have our own, with corporate badging, some pages lockable, & a whole lot more functionality, but at this stage we are just testing the water.

I looked around for some comparisons.  I found the Wikimatrix ( http://www.wikimatrix.org/ ) useful to some extent, cutting the possibilities back to a dozen or so.   A bit of a subjective run & my list came down to four: Seedwiki, Jotspot, pbWiki & Wikispaces.

We’ve used Seedwiki once before in the library.  It was pretty basic, & there was an obvious problem when we were all working on different pages & hit ’save’ - each update resaved all pages, so it had to be updated sequentially.  I’ve also had a play with JotSpot.  It again seemed pretty basic, & what you get as a freebie doesn’t seem well explained.  Suggestions of a limit of 5 users & 10 pages, limited appearance options, & a layout that seemed dominated by nav sidebars & titles didn’t seem to have user appeal (N.B. Jotspot is finding its feet again after having just been bought by Google – so it must have something going for it).   Robyn had given pbWiki a run, but had some usability issues with it.  I set up trials on all of these as well as Wikispaces (via Edublogs) which promised full – functionality & no ads – but it didn’t quite work out that way.  I also had some issues with pbWiki, primarily appearance & a tendency to reformat my layout at each save.  So it ultimately came down to Wikispaces, which had a cleaner layout & readability. 

Ultimately, however, if it is decided to proceed I would consider an upgrade to a paid, domain based corporate item, which would also open up the field considerably.

This one will be at http://horttafe.wikispaces.com/