TedTycoon.co.uk:About

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TedTycoon.co.uk is my (Ted John) personal domain and web site first created in 2004. It was originally dedicated to the game Populous where each page was related to the game and also contained the utilities I developed for it. In about 2007 I made the site more general and Populous became a sub-section, with the rest about me and my other programs. Through the years it has been through many major and minor updates with different site designs, layouts and material. In 2010 I started again with this, a private wiki, containing information about me and material on my programs, projects and experience.

Domain

The domain was first registered for me on 23rd December 2003. The websever is hosted by Fasthosts along with the MySQL database used by this wiki and the Changeringing Wiki.

MediaWiki

I have used MediaWiki written in PHP to create several other wikis including the Populous Wiki and the Changeringing Wiki so I have quite a bit of knowledge on the application. I therefore used it again for my personal website. Special:Version contains information about the version of the MediaWiki package and the extensions it's using.

Reasons for using a wiki

  • MediaWiki is a content management system. It can be edited by one or multiple users. In this case just me, but I can login anywhere to edit pages.
  • The wiki markup is much quicker to write in than conventional HTML. Dynamic templates can also be created and used to reduce duplicating portions of HTML. These are then included in a simple way allowing you to set the template parameters.
  • I think the navigation created by MediaWiki is very good and consistent. Inter-wiki links are quick to insert in pages. All pages can have categories applied to them giving category navigation.
  • MediaWiki is a popular wiki package with Wikipedia being the most used wiki and one of the most popular websites. People are familiar with how to navigate through it.
  • All the edits are recorded through history. I can see all the versions of each page and do not lose any original content by it being overwritten.
  • All the content is stored in a database. I find this better than backing up files repeatedly.
  • Uploading and inserting images is quick and easy. The markup allows me to caption them and place them in the desired place.
  • A search tool is provided along with many other things such as RSS feeds.
  • Table of contents are generated and added to large pages automatically (but can be removed for exception pages)
  • There are many useful extensions that can be installed, e.g. ParserFunctions, Syntax Highlighting of code etc.
  • I have installed an extension that allows me to easily add any custom HTML or Javascript inline with the wiki markup. I do not need to worry about vandalism as I am the only user.

Thus it provides a great package for creating a simple yet large portfolio. I do not have enough content to blog frequently. Any news I have is written on the Main Page of the wiki. This is of course added easily through a template.

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