wUX-log,+our+wiki+user+experiences

=What is this page for? = This page has been set up so that we can record our experiences, reflections, even frustrations in learning to use this particular Wikispaces wiki system. The style-guide for this page is: 
 * Add your entry to the end of this page so they entries accumulate in forward-chronological fashion
 * Separate your entry from the preceding one with a Horizontal Rule (button to the left of the chains in the Editor toolbar)
 * Each entry starts with your name and the date/time: just a Normal para, made bold
 * An entry title is next, tagged as Heading 1. I'm numbering them consecutively and making them red.
 * After that you're free to do what you like. This is one page where you shouldn't edit other people's entries, BTW.

=1. Firefox versus Internet Explorer experience = Until today the bulk of my KIDMMwiki edit experiences have been on a Mac, using Firefox 3. Today I am editing using Internet Explorer on a PC. I think the editing experience in IE is not so nice as in Firefox.
 * Conrad Taylor [user:conradtaylor] — 10/07/07, 13:04**
 * While I was making this edit, IE6 froze and I had to do a Ctrl–Alt–Del EndTask manouevre. Fortunately Wikispaces had done an autosave for me.
 * In the Editor toolbar, IE6 does not display a preview of the Heading styles, as it does in Firefox3 on Mac.
 * IE6 seems unable correctly to display the transparency around the PNG version of the KIDMM logo which I uploaded, whereas Firefox displays it very nicely.

=2. The usefulnesses of the text-editor mode = When you edit a page in a Wikispaces wiki, by default you are in **Visual Editor** mode – codeless editing, as in a normal word-processor. As an alternative you can click on the ‘Text Editor’ button on the Editor toolbar, and you will be taken into a **Text Editor** mode in which you cannot see any of the effects (such as font sizes, colours and so on). Instead, you get to see the embedded codes. In some wiki systems (MediaWiki which powers Wikipedia is an example), this kind of text coding mode is all you get, so — //tough!// ¶ Text-editor mode has its uses, though. Suppose you are about to try something ‘dangerous’ and you’d like to hold the contents of a page in a safe place. Wikispaces doesn’t provide you with that kind of cache, but you could enter text-mode, copy the coded page contents to a text editor and hold it there. ¶ Sometimes the Visual Editor mode seems to misbehave e.g. it won’t revert out of italics. Text-editor mode is more predictable. ¶ Quite often, I want to prepare text for Web, wiki or blog use when I am in transit and have no Internet access. Provided I learn Wikispaces text mark-up, which is a mix of WikiText and HTML, I can pre-prepare texts and copy and paste them into a Wikispaces text editing window when I get access.
 * Conrad Taylor [user:conradtaylor] — 10/07/09, 16:50**

=3. Wot, no Slideshare? = Just checked our Notes and Docs page, and Ed’s Slideshare presentation isn’t showing on the page in IE6. The question is, is this a problem with IE6? I rather think not. Could it be that the Thomson Reuters firewall has been set to reject certain kinds of media?
 * Conrad Taylor [user:conradtaylor] — 10/07/09, 17:52**

=4. Changing Theme, and a mix-up with dates = David Wilcox had asked me where the navigation bar had gone. I wrote back in some confusion because as far as was concerned the navigation bar hadn’t gone anywhere! Later he wrote to say – //oops//, there it is, on the other side of the Google adverts. ¶ If you are reading this and you are confused (because the navigation is on the left side of your screen)… that is because when Richard Millwood set up this site, he chose the **Notebook Theme**, with a spiral-bound notebook graphic background, and the navigational menu placed onto a torn-paper background on the extreme right. I had a couple of mails from people who said they didn't like it, and David said he’d prefer the navigation on the left. <span style="color: rgb(204,0,0);">¶ //Ich Dien//. This morning I swapped the design over to a Theme called **Tatami Left**, and edited the colours in a blue-wards direction. A bit more institutional perhaps, but… anyway, let’s see how people like that.
 * Conrad Taylor [user:conradtaylor] – 11/07/09, 07:40**

<span style="color: rgb(204,0,0);">Dates and times – where in the world?
When I checked the site this morning for recent changes, I saw that some of the changes I had made yesterday afternoon and evening were attributed to a mid-morning time. My system clock is OK, my personal sub to Wikispaces is set to Greenwich (UMT), so what’s going on? Can’t find a control panel for the wiki that sets the world location for date and time stamping.

= 5. Text-editor mode useful for preparing tables offline = On Sunday, while travelling by bus, I used my laptop to listen to a recording of the 8 July workshop introduction session, in which we each offered three ‘tags’, and transcribed the data into a text-editor. As I did so, I added the very simple text mark-up which, in the Wikispaces wikitext ‘Text Editor’ mode, is used to create a table and set the boundaries between cells. Basically, it uses the vertical ‘pipe’ character typed twice. When I once again had internet access, I created a new wiki page, jumped into Text Editor mode, pasted the marked-up text and saved. Tables in a flash! <span style="color: rgb(204,0,0);">¶ This also has the advantage that if you want to re-order the rows in a table, it's much easier to do so in the offline text editor. I used BBEdit on a Macintosh.
 * Conrad Taylor [user: conradtaylor] – 13/07/09, 11:50**

= 6. Wikispaces weirdness when you try to make a link bold = I note with some puzzlement that if you have already made a link from some text to another page, and on a later occasion you want to make that link-text bold, it often happens that you don’t succeed — instead, you get two asterisks to either side of the link-text. These double-asterisk marks are in fact the wikitext mark-up for emboldening text, and I assume that Wikispaces is fussy about which mark-up is allowed to occur inside which. There is never any problem if you make text bold and then immediately make a link to another page. <span style="color: rgb(204,0,0);">¶ My suggestion is that when you get into this kind of twist, you should either go into Text Editor mode and sort out the wiring behind the page, or (if the idea of that gives you the heebiejeebies) delete the link-text and start again.
 * Conrad Taylor [user: conradtaylor] – 15/07/09, 15:00**

= 7. Scribd embedding works; very encouraging! = Just yesterday, I joined the Scribd service for posting documents online and making them available for viewing in iPaper format (See Glossary entry). As an experiment, I uploaded my wiki notes for the 8 July workshop, opted to mark them ‘private’, and copied the embedding code, which I then pasted into our page for workshop notes. I was very pleased to see how well that worked. And when I turned up today to work at Thomson Reuters, I see that the Scribd document is visible, unlike the Slideshare one which still isn’t (see item 3 above).
 * Conrad Taylor [user: conradtaylor] – 3/08/09, 15:37**

= 8. Two formatting controls that are gravely missed = In Wikispaces, a carriage return between adjacent paragraphs does not result in any extra space between the paragraphs. Is this a wise default, or not? Personally I find it very irritating because a full linespace seems to me to be bad practice, and too much space – too gappy. That is why I have been setting a pilcrow character to mark new paragraphs. (Incidentally I have shunned a full linespace between characters ever since I purchased an Adler Gabrielle manual typewriter when going up to University in the mid-seventies. I would always put a space and a half between paragraphs. So now you know.) <span style="color: rgb(204,0,0);">¶ Perhaps even more serious is the lack of any obvious way to control the width to which a table column is set. The Wikispaces engines of formatting seem to assign widths arbitrarily to columns. This something that would be very likely to put me off a wiki system, because I would not like the results to be so amateur-looking. There may be a way to rein in this kind of anarchy, but I haven’t found it yet!
 * Conrad Taylor [user: conradtaylor] – 10/08/09, 16:46**