Organize Your Life With A Wiki

Posted 10/05/2007 at 10:13am | by Gina Trapani

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Edit and Create Wiki Pages

Immediately, your new wiki confronts you with a gaping, empty text area. Remember: A wiki is a website you author, so the home page is empty until you fill it. Thus, the first thing you should do with your wiki is fill in the home page.

Instiki’s page edit mode has three components: the text area on the left containing the page’s current content (none on a newborn wiki), a text formatting guide on the right, and the Submit button next to an author name on the bottom.

Instiki's Textile formatting tips detail special wiki markup that formats the text in your pages.

To add text to your home page, simply type in the text area. Before you submit your changes, you can set the author name to your name (by default it’s AnonymousCoward). Specifying the author’s name is more important on a group wiki, where others are likely to check to see who made what updates. If this wiki is for your personal, individual use, it’s not as necessary.

Once you press Submit, you’ll see your newly created home page, which contains the text you entered. From there, you can click the “Edit Page” link on the bottom-left of the page to change or add to the page’s content.

Keep in mind that a wiki is not just one web page. It’s a collection of as many web pages as you wish to create, interlinked using what are called “wiki words.” Double square brackets designate a word or phrase as a wiki word. You’ll use wiki words to create new pages and link to wiki pages throughout your Instiki web.

For example, if you want to create a to-do list on your wiki, first click Edit Page on the home page. Somewhere inside the home page text area, add the wiki word [[My To Do List]]. Save your changes. Your new home page will contain the phrase “My To Do List” with a question mark next to it (minus the brackets). The question mark indicates that the wiki word points to a page that hasn’t been created yet. To compose the My To Do List page, click the question mark and you’ll be in the new page’s edit mode. From there you can start entering your list.

Once you get comfortable editing your wiki’s pages, you’ll want to format your text to your liking for easy readability. Instiki uses the Textile markup language by default and offers a quick guide to Textile formatting on the right side of the edit mode. For example, to create a bulleted list, add an asterisk (*) to the beginning of each line item. When you save your changes, you’ll see you’ve created a bulleted list of items with those asterisks, like the one seen here.

✦ Take clothes to the dry cleaner
✦ Mail the rent check
✦ Finish writing wiki article

Likewise, you can bold, italicize, and color text in your pages and create numbered lists, tables, headings, images, and links to external web pages.

Put Instiki to Good Use

Unlike most specialized software applications—like a project planner or calendar package—your wiki doesn’t have predefined fields for specific types of information. You can create any number of pages, linked from one another in any structure you choose based on the wiki words you enter. Every page is just a wide-open text area, and you format its contents however you choose. Therefore, there’s no limit to the types of information you can store in your wiki. Here are some ideas:

Lists: Whether it’s a to-do list, grocery list, or laundry list, your Instiki wiki’s a great place to stow it. Simply enter one item per line or use the asterisk to bullet each item. While you can’t cross items off a list in your wiki, Instiki stores page-revision history over time. So you can click the “See changes” link at the bottom of any page to see items that have been added to a list (in green) and removed (in red) backward and forward through time.

Bookmarks: Add web-page links to your Instiki wiki using the yourlinkname:http://example.com notation. Alternatively, simply enter a URL into a page, and Instiki will automatically make it clickable. While plenty of web-based services—such as del.icio.us—can store your bookmarks online, storing links in your Instiki wiki keeps them private and doesn’t limit the amount of information you can enter along with them.

Software serial numbers and website passwords: You just plunked down $50 for the latest version of your favorite software package, and you want to store the license key information in a safe, central place—like your wiki. Create a Serial Numbers page and keep a list of all the license keys you’ve collected over time. Use the same technique for low-security website passwords: Whenever you create a new login, drop it into your wiki for safekeeping.

Recipes: Copy and paste your favorite chicken recipe into your wiki, and when you experiment with the ingredients, update the page with your adjustments. The wiki’s free-form structure makes it perfect for recipes—you can include images, ingredient lists, notes on preparation, and links to the original recipe on the web. And when you’re craving your favorite chicken and mushroom dish? Just type “chicken mushrooms” into Instiki’s search box to retrieve the recipe.

A page of information in Instiki is free-form and can contain lists, links, section headings, and paragraphs.

Research: Planning a party, work event, vacation, or home-improvement project? Collecting information for a report at work? Your wiki’s a great place to save web clippings, phone numbers, directions, and addresses, which you can search by keyword later.

Wish lists and gift ideas: Your wiki’s an easy, private place to store wish-list items and gift ideas with links to buy the items online or reminders about what her favorite wine or his favorite cologne is, so you’ll be ready when a special occasion arises.

Digital diary: When was the last time the dog got shots? Or you got the oil changed? Or the kids went to the dentist? How many cigarettes did you smoke today, or pounds did you lose this month, or miles did you run this week? Your personal wiki’s a good place to log information like this for instant recall later on.

Holiday card lists: Easily track the names and addresses of people you sent cards to and whom you received cards from in your personal wiki. If you enter each person on one line, with each piece of information separated by a comma (e.g., name, street address, city, state, zip code) you can easily copy and paste the text from your wiki page into Excel or an online card service to do a quick mail merge. Also, Instiki automatically links email addresses for one-click message composition from any page.

Next: Tips and Tricks!