Steve Sexton

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Country: USA

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20 Jul 2009 Another update. I'd mostly forgotten about TWiki but received the email update so I stopped back to see what's changed. Turns out its a lot, TWiki has really grown up. Very cool. I don't use it anymore, my current content management tool of choice is Drupal, for the handful of small websites I maintain I find it more suitable. I'm forced to use Confluence at work, its terrible, but its hard to get them to quit the Atlassian Kool Aid (they use Jira too).

08 Jan 2007 Well, here I am back again. Surprised my account is still here, hehe. I'm considering my 3rd TWiki install for use at Hurricane Games, specifically to provide the "Lore Book" and story-related content for each game, starting with Kilton Online. It looks like a LOT has happened since I've last been here, it is certainly a lot nicer looking. Hopefully this will turn out to suit the projects needs; ultimately, I'd like to make it a public Wiki but if the old technical problems still exist, then I might have to go for a 'publish to static pages' approach.

For the record, the previous two installs were www.digitaledgesw.com which I ultimately ended up changing into a Nucleus-based blog (besides the robot issue I mentioned below, I just plain found that a blog-like dated journal was better suited to the type of content I wanted), and the Mercator blog (see below). Note that Mercator is no longer in business, their assets have been acquired by IBM, and the www.mercator.com link is now owned by someone else, a travel company or something.

02 Oct 2003 Quick update. The Wiki is back behind the firewall. Actually, it has been since April or so, after I had a bad experience with a web crawler killing my system trying to execute CGI after CGI that it didn't have permissions for. And, this was a "bad crawler" that ignored robots.txt. Until there is a skin that minimizes the number of "authorization required" links on the view page, I don't think I could put this back outside the firewall and feel good about it.

Oh, and another quick update re: Mercator. The mgmt never did get to put in their $50K document management system. Luckily, the Wiki was in place to fill the need for a "public whiteboard" that is accessible from the desktop. I have no idea who is maintaining it these days, since my TWiki co-conspirator was RIF'ed ( "reduction in force", aka laid off ) this year. But it is still in active use afaik, the degree of self-administration it allows is what keeps it alive.

02 Jan 2003 The Wiki is UP and open for business. And public. I was originally going to do it on on Apache/Solaris 8-Intel, but ended up doing it on Apache/Mandrake Linux 9 instead. It's got a few plugins to make it look "more professional" (someone else's words), most notably the excellent Koala Skin (it's a pain to set up, but it's worth it). The Wiki experiment continues...

Incidentally, the "Web Preferences" is a bit of a hodgepodge... some of the items are specific to the "default" skin, some are specific to certain functions, etc. The Web Prefs on my TWiki are heavily refactored to reflect this.

Notes from the Mercator install (in case its useful to anyone)

We were looking at TWiki for use in our R&D intranet. The testimonials from Motorola and SAP were very encouraging. It started out running in a test sandbox on Win2K, ActivePerl, MKS Toolkit (for ls/grep) and OmniHTTPd. The production environment was IIS. I have the usual complaints about how painful it is to get TWiki running on Windows, and in general, a platform that isn't Unix + Apache. Removing the Unix-isms (see shell meta-characters gripes below) would be a help to shops that must use Windoze. But overall I am very pleased with it (and addicted...).

Notes:

1. OmniHTTPd: be sure the "Preserve PATH_INFO" is checked !
2. IIS: we had a "conflict with Front Page extensions" that caused it to be painfully slow. Unfortunately the IT guy never gave us any details.
3. Shell-isms: A general note to Windows users (this might be an MKS thing): a few places in the TWiki Perl code assumes that shell metacharacters > and | are available. These don't work on Windows (at least, not for me). I've seen this with the Edit function (and have a patch), and also on search by topic name (which I've hacked by removing the grep, so at least WebIndex works).
4. Tiger Skin: The default skin that comes with TWiki was a major barrier to its adoption. It was considered "too techie" and not good for a "general user". I added Tiger Skin and got a lot of "ooh, ahh" about how it was suddenly "more friendly".

Unfortunately, after all this work, management killed it because all along they really wanted to spend $50K on a less-capable, "commercial document management system". I guess the brass had used something fancy in a previous life and wanted to roll it out at the new company. Sigh

Personal Preferences (details in TWikiVariables)

• Horizontal size of text edit box:
  • Set EDITBOXWIDTH = 70
• Vertical size of text edit box:
  • Set EDITBOXHEIGHT = 17
• Optionally write protect your home page: (set it to your WikiName)
  • Set ALLOWTOPICCHANGE = SteveSexton

Related topics

• TWikiPreferences has site-level preferences of TWiki.
• WebPreferences has preferences of the TWiki.Main web.
• TWikiUsers has a list of other TWiki users.