About This Site [Notes]

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# About This Site #


## History ##

Years ago, I kept a blog (http://skysigal.xact-solutions.com) where I shared tech ideas and code fragments.

For the first couple of years it was a lot of fun to maintain.

I fell out of love with it and stopped adding more posts to it for three reasons:

* First of all, it was really hard to *find* things in it. No matter what different categorisation techniques I tried, it just never was enough. Blogs are a publication mechanism. Not a filing system.

* Secondly, I started to see how older posts, containing code fragments that were styled by the WYSIWYG editors in accordance with the site's style sheet, were very difficult to update in order to be inline with  the current style sheet. This is because the WYSIWYG html editors were saving a combination of information+markup in the same datastore. That's an architectural no-no, guaranteed to ensure that the data has a limited shelf-life (this is the reason that as a developer I refuse to use the corporate [Sharepoint](http://sharepoint.microsoft.com) wiki: the information we have to collate to do our work as developers is too expensive to entrust into a system that fubar's it to a point of uselessness.
* Thirdly, over time, although useful, I came to hate [DNN](http://www.dotnetnuke.com) 's lack of *elegance*. I felt that every interaction with it made me more and more accepting of short-term practical reasons to not continue striving for better in the long-term. Simply had to stop.

#### A Fresh Start ####
A little while later, I re-discovered [Wikis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki) and more importantly, [Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown).  
With all 3 problems solved, I've started this new site.

Enjoy the public areas.

## Site Conventions ##

You have access to update any page within the public areas: feel free to add elucidation to existing material or add additional new materia.

#### Syntax ####

Use [Basic Markdown](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) rather than the default WYSIWYG editor (cleaner syntax).

Which is no more than:

<sxh>
##Header2##
###Header3###

*Italics in bracing single stars*
**Bolds in bracing double stars**

* Bullet1
    * Bullet2 (sub-bullets are simply indented by 4 spaces) 

Preformatted stuff such as code is just done by
indenting by 4 soaces.

Links are of two kinds:

[[inter-wiki links are surrounded by two square brackets/]]
[visible text](big world link)


Inter-wiki links with colons make folders (useful for ACL authorisation), otherwise all other characters are valid.

[[IT/Javascript/]] creates a page called Javascript nested in About folder nested in IT folder. 
Each folder gets a Home file, so [[IT/]] is exactly the same as  [[IT/AD/Home/]]
And although folders are good -- too many nested folders can be hard to manage, so use / slashes after a while:
[[IT/Javascript/HowTo]] creates a page called HowTo_Javascript nested in About folder nested in IT folder.



I'm not so keen on using tables (not very portable), but if you must:

^header1^header2^header3^Average^
|A|1|2|

For more info on tables: https://www.dokuwiki.org/wiki:syntax#tables

That should do it...
</sxh>



Don't worry too much about making errors when entering data: it's all correctable -- and if you really stuff up, versioning ensures that changes are logged, and can also be used to retrieve previous versions of the data. I'm more interested in useful notes than anything else.


#### Taxonomy ####

*Search* capabilities are only is useful when you know the phrase you are searching for.

*Organisation* is useful when you don't know the phrase, but know the approximate problem boundary.  

Edit anywhere you go, but before *adding* new material, **please** take a while to get to know the SiteMap in order to better understand where to create it. 

Or simply [[site/contact|ask]] for help getting started.

Thanks!