Message #791

From: Melinda Green <melinda@superliminal.com>
Subject: Re: wiki
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:24:44 -0800

Matthew James Sheerin wrote:
> Hi Melinda
>
>
>
> The wiki may work well for the more programming inclined, but when I tried to add my record I was baffled about what I actually had to do!
> Sorry for the bother

No bother at all, Matthew. I hope you’ll forgive me for replying to the
whole group because I’m sure other people can use this information, and
others can correct me if I get anything wrong.

Wiki editing is the same everywhere, so even though this will seem kind
of complicated, you’ll get used to it quickly and it will let you make
corrections to Wikipedia and other wiki’s. You simply use the "Edit" tab
of the page you want to change (or the "edit" link of just one section).
You need to use the particular Wiki’s mark-up notation, but I think that
links are universally implemented by bracketing the link text with
double square braces [[like this]]. When you save the page, that text
will appear as a red link, meaning that there’s no page there yet. You
then simply click the link and edit the empty page to make it real.
Basically, you start with the end result you want and work backwards to
fill in the details. Mostly, people just follow the formatting patterns
they see when editing pages, but when stuck, see the documentation on
the entire syntax for the particular wiki we’re using here:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting.

To add your record, first edit the table on the records page and add
your data to the appropriate row if it already exists. If it doesn’t,
then add the row. In both cases, just carefully follow the pattern of
the other rows. IMPORTANT: hit the "Preview" button often to see the
effect of your changes, and just hit "Submit" once it all looks correct.

Now, you need to create your user page to hold your log files. If that
page doesn’t exist, then maybe you should do this in two steps. First
make your link to be simply your user page. In my case it’s
[[User:Cutelyaware]]. Next, click it and add some personal data at the
top, and then add a named section containing your solution below that.
Just look at other people’s pages and click "Edit" to see the format
they used. The "div" lines create named sections that can be linked to.
Once you’ve created one containing your log file, go back to the records
page and change your link to point to the exact section. For example, my
first record link looks like this:
[[User:Cutelyaware#333-2-1|Melinda Green]]
This is just a fancy way to say that the link should point to the
333-2-1 section of my User:Cutelyaware page, and that the link text
should simply say "Melinda Green" since I don’t want the link to show my
user name and section. Other solutions of mine display the same text but
point to different sections on my page.

The last thing you should consider doing is to click the puzzle name in
the first column and add your solution info to the solution history for
that puzzle. This part is optional but highly encouraged.

That’s it. Now if someone wants to add some of the above to a wiki help
page, that’d be wonderful. ;-)

> PS. When I finished the solve it didn’t show a message on-screen as expected, any ideas as to why this is?

Eek! I’ve seen false positive notices of full solves, but never a
failure to notice a real one. Has anyone else seen this too? One
possibility is that you didn’t perform a full scramble before solving. 8
random twists on small puzzles scramble them pretty well but officially,
the scrambles need to begin with Scramble > Full for solutions to be
valid. Did it beep when you finished your solve? If so, this is probably
what happened, or at least what the program *thought* happened. Send me
your log file and I’ll see if I can learn more.

Good luck!
-Melinda