The Wiki Thread

[catastrophile]

Because it's easier to get y'all's attention here than there.

Wetpaint is pretty nifty so far in most regards, but one problem is that there seems to be no way to fix column widths within tables. Columns are spaced evenly unless there's something to force one wider, resulting in, to be frank, dumb-looking tables.

Anyway. The fix I've come up with is to replace the table headers with images, forcing the columns to the width of the image. But monitors being what they are, I'd like for people to come by Pixie's page and let me know if 450 is too wide for the Titles column image.

More importantly, this brilliant idea leads naturally into folks drawing their own header images, if they're so inclined. So, if we can come up with a standard width that will work for most people, that'll be nifty.

EDIT: Apparently, transparent GIFs are something else that Wetpaint doesn't "do" very well.

[James]

The image was displaying higher up than he text, so I restored the text and put a 1px high spacer underneath it. I think that should work OK. I really don't know why they don't just have customisable column width. It's a basic HTML feature. Perhaps they're trying to keep the interface simple or something.

[Dusk]

I'm gonna try popping some pictures in mine. It looks pretty durn ugly as it is.
It seems I can only navigate the tables made by others via cursor keys.

[Dusk]

GAH! The whole Red Skivvy Guy table is ruined!
buhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'll fix it tomorrow.

Edit: Well.. all the links in the table are still intact. I just can't make them clickyable.
Any ideas?

[PonderThis]

Yea, I just took a look at it. It's weird; somehow that table is in some special state. Looking at the page source ... well, that'll take a while to debug, and I have a real job to get back to. My brief quicky diagnosis is that this is a bug in the web site software. Maybe catastrophile can find something out ...

[Dusk]

Yea, I just took a look at it. It's weird; somehow that table is in some special state. Looking at the page source ... well, that'll take a while to debug, and I have a real job to get back to. My brief quicky diagnosis is that this is a bug in the web site software. Maybe catastrophile can find something out ...

Yeah. it was bizarre.

.. so I did it all again.

[PonderThis]

You re-entered all that?!? Ouchie!

Meanwhile, I've started a character page on Eggplant Mike, if anyone wants to contribute looking up threads and/or correcting any mistakes I've made in the initial description.

[catastrophile]

Wait. What happened?

[Dusk]

Wait. What happened?

Well, the entire table full of links was unusable.
Everything was still intact.. it's just that after you saved it and tried to navigate the page, the links weren't clickable.
Strange.
But I re-did the whole thing anyway. Gave me a chance to listen to some old CDs.

[catastrophile]

It's a basic HTML feature.

The fact that the whatsit doesn't even recognize <a> tags (for example) indicates that "basic HTML" isn't basic enough. But I tried another free wiki site, and they didn't register manual code either. At least they take hypertext if you paste it in from elsewhere.

. . .

I wonder if I could just paste in a table from an HTML file . . .

Wow, okay, that actually sorta worked. I pulled up a webpage with a table on it, copied and pasted into a Wetpaint page, and the formatting (background colors and column widths) was retained.

So . . . I guess that means that if you're HTML-proficient, you can set your tags as desired, then open the file in a browser window and paste it over. Try it out.

This interface seems goofier the more I learn about it.

EDIT: M'kay, it appears that you can paste in a whole table and it will retain the properties of the original, but if you attempt to edit the table structure -- such as by adding rows -- the columns will go back to uniform width. If you set a background color in the <table> tag, however, it will be applied to new lines you create in the editor.

[James]

I can see what they're trying to do with the interface, but isn't there a way to access the markup behind it?

[chrismachine]

what the hell is wetpaint? what is it for? what are you all doing with it? why has it only come up now?

[catastrophile]

A build-your-own-wiki site, building your own wiki, building our own wiki, and it came up four days ago -- the day after I started it.

[PonderThis]

I've made a page on Eggplant Mike. I know the list isn't complete, so if anyone recalls a cartoon that didn't make the list, feel free to add it.

I also did a page for Dween in the Spamusers section. I'm fairly confident the list is complete, since the only thing Dween posts is comics. If anyone has a better description, feel free to change what I've written.

what the hell is wetpaint? what is it for? what are you all doing with it? why has it only come up now?

I think that's Chris's way of saying "Wow! What a great idea! I wish I had thought of that!" Or he's just afraid of change.

[catastrophile]

It was suggested a couple of times, and I waited to see if somebody else would take the initiative. Then, grudgingly, I gave in and did it myself.

I'm enjoying the heck out of compiling PixieWolfe's list. Which is lucky, because I've only done a month's worth, and it's . . . Well, see for yourself. I'll probably wind up giving her spamology its own subpage.

By the way, <3 this:

[chrismachine]

I've made a page on Eggplant Mike. I know the list isn't complete, so if anyone recalls a cartoon that didn't make the list, feel free to add it.

I also did a page for Dween in the Spamusers section. I'm fairly confident the list is complete, since the only thing Dween posts is comics. If anyone has a better description, feel free to change what I've written.

what the hell is wetpaint? what is it for? what are you all doing with it? why has it only come up now?

I think that's Chris's way of saying "Wow! What a great idea! I wish I had thought of that!" Or he's just afraid of change.

if you'll check the site, you'll see that this is exactly the case!

[caboosewasframed]

All I could do with mine was use the (weak) tools they have - if there's any way to hit the actual markup stuff, I'd like to know.

[apronymaniac]

Me too!

[catastrophile]

You folks (those of you who've registered, at least) have the same toolset I do . . . if none of us has found a way to directly get at the code, we can figure it's not there. The other wiki sites I looked at have an interface that acceptsa sort of pseudo-html, where you can type [http://www.dickwad.com/ like this] and it'll convert it into a link . . . but that interface doesn't recognize standard code or hypertext that's copy-pasted in (all formatting is lost).

So it's a tradeoff. I don't know why these sites don't want to let you at the code, except maybe that limiting the customizability also limits the "help me I f@cked up my site" messages they'll be getting. If anybody knows or wants to find or start a wiki site that accepts code, do it before this thing gets too much larger, and I'll handle the migration myself

[James]

I think there are free Wikimedia hosts out there, but I'm not sure how good they are.

[Dusk]

I think there's enough to get creative with there.
If you want a multimedia extravaganza of your own design, then make your own website, I say.

[giantsfan97]

I've been holding back from going ahead and making pages for other people. I mean.. people probably want to make their own.
Maybe if someone wants one done for them, they should say so in this thread.

My biggest problem is that a lot of my best work came in threads that someone else started, but if someone wanted to put some of the ones I made on that site Im ok with that.

[catastrophile]

if someone wanted to put some of the ones I made on that site

Roffle lemau.

I had no idea your catalogue was so expansive.

After some playing with the forum search, I decided that the easiest thing to do is run a search by post author, choose the "guest strips" forum, set the order to ascending, display results as posts, and show the first 1000 characters.

That makes it pretty easy to scan the results for image urls and just open the relevant pages, and has the advantage of turning up posts that are buried in other people's threads. In this case, I found a character string unique to gf's photobucket account and searched each page of the search results for it, to speed up the job.

D&D was cancelled yesterday. I was bored.

[giantsfan97]

Wow! This gets linked to in my sig. Thanks!

[James]

expansive

Expansive? Extensive? Expensive!