blog/wiki site -- more info...

[ravi <listmail@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There are different types of content you can post to the new website:

http://rationalfools.com/site/

Please do not post any "real" material, since I will be recreating the
site from scratch, if we decide to go with this approach. Instead, feel
free to create test content that you should expect to be deleted.

Click on the "Create Content" link on the left menu (typical, though it
might be on the right, if you changed your visual theme), and choose a
content type:

Blog
----

As a registered user, you are assigned a "blog" to which you can add
personal journal entries. The site software supports various Blog and
XML-RPC APIs -- what that means is that if you use blogging tools (e.g:
w.bloggar) you can post to this site using that tool.

Poll
----

Fairly obvious.

Page
----

A generic web page. This is what you would use to create a page with
some information on some idea, concept, event, etc. You could use one of
the more exotic types like "book" or "story" but let's ignore them for now.

In a web page, you can enter plain text, and mark it up using simple
Wiki markup for bold, italics, etc.

A page has a URL (address) that points to it, but what good are orphaned
pages? You want the pages to be interlinked and part of the web site
hierarchy. So, before we write pages, we should figure out a general
hierarchy and then for each page figure out a place in the site
hierarchy for it (An alternative means is to use the taxonomy system,
but let's set that aside for now).

In Wikis, the hierarchy (or graph, really) sort of naturally progresses
from the top level page. So, if you think something is front page
material, create a Wiki link for it in the front page.

Let's walk through an example:

Say you want to add a page about the economic implications of Hurricane
Katrina. You figure this is not front page material. There is no obvious
place either, on the front page, where you could link to this page. So,
you decide to create a "Historic Events" page and link to your "Katrina"
page from that, and link the "Historic Events" to the main page.

Here's what you would do:

1. Visit http://rationalfools.com/site/ and click on 'Edit'

2. Use the fancy editor (FCKEditor) to enter some text into the body:

   [[Historic Events]] -- some historic events

What you have done above is to create a link to the "Historic Events"
page using the "freelinking" feature. The double square-brackets
automatically convert the enclosed test to an intra-site link.

3. Save the main page.

Of course there is no page yet called "Historic Events". Not to worry.
The main page now contains the link, and:

4. Clicking on the link takes you to a new page creation form, to
   create the "Historic Events" page.

5. Here you can enter another bullet item:

   [[Hurricane Katrina]] -- the aftermath in New Orleans

6. Save the "Historic Events" page and upon visiting it, you can, as
   in the previous step, click on the "Hurricane Katrina" link to
   create the "Hurricane Katrina" page.

This is one of the many ways by which to create the web of pages on the
site.

The other way is of course to simply use "Create Content" to create all
the pages, and use HTML or freelinking to link between them, once they
have been created.

        --ravi


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