HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
The name
wiki
comes from the name of the original wiki software, which was called
WikiWikiWeb, taken from an airport bus route in Honolulu, Hawaii. To read more about
the nature of wikis and their history, why not read about them in Wikipedia? The URL is
Aside that everyone can edit the pages in a wiki, the other distinguishing feature of
wikis is that they generally provide their own markup language rather than HTML.
Generally wiki markup is less flexible than HTML but also a bit easier to get the
hang of. Unfortunately, wiki markup usually differs between wiki software packages,
so learning MediaWiki's markup language won't help you out a whole lot if you start
using TWiki, for example.
Wikis aren't right for every project. If you want to publish your poetry online, putting it
up on a page where anyone can edit it probably isn't a good idea. On the other hand, if
you need a site where a group can collaboratively write documentation for a project, a
wiki can be a great choice. Here's a list of other popular wiki applications and hosts:
WikiWikiWeb
(http://c2.com/cgi/wiki)
—The original wiki.
n
MediaWiki
(http://www.mediawiki.org/)
—The software behind Wikipedia. I dis-
cuss it more later in this lesson.
n
You can find a comparison of various wiki software packages at
There's also a list of hosted wikis that you can use at
Image Galleries
As digital cameras have grown more popular, so too has sharing photos online. There are
many photo-sharing sites online that you can use to host your photos. Some popular
choices include Flickr
(http://flickr.com/)
, Picasa
(http://picasa.google.com/),
and
SmugMug (
http://smugmug.com).
If you just want to upload pictures and share them with your friends and family mem-
bers, these sites provide an easy way to do that. In some cases, however, you might want
to host your own image galleries. A number of popular image gallery applications are
available that vary in terms of complexity and the extent to which they can be cus-
tomized. The good ones take care of creating thumbnails of your images for you so that
you can just upload your photos without dealing with image-editing programs.
