Yada Wiki plugin for WordPress

Recently I was working on creating a website for which my client wanted a wiki (in fact, really a knowledge base. We’ll come back to this later).  The budget in this case was nil, which might lead you to suspect that “you get what you pay for” and nothing useful would be available.  As it happens, that’s far from the truth.

Initially I investigated “Mediawiki” and while that is VERY powerful wiki software (it runs wikipedia after all) it was far more complex than my client needed or desired.

The basic requirements were:

  • Full integration with WordPress site
  • Ease of Use in writing / creating content
  • Ease of ongoing maintenance / updating.
  • Free Support
  • Easy to Learn

An attack on Google led me to this useful blog post which in turn led me to the excellent, and free, Yada Wiki plugin by David McCann.

Yada Wiki meets all of the requirements mentioned above, and does so admirably.

 

You can learn more about Yada Wiki and how to use it, in this video:

 

Oh and I promised I’d come back to the difference between a wiki and a knowledge base.

A wiki is a website on which users collaboratively modify content and structure directly from the web browser.
The example most people are familiar with, wikipedia, would have millions of contributors.

A knowledge base, while having a technical definition (a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system, as opposed to a database) is often thought of as a like a wiki, but with a limited number of users or admins creating the content for consumption by others. This was the use case for the site I created for my client.

Cheers all.

Finding free images for your website or blog

As people who blog or run websites, it’s often difficult to find high quality images which we can use for free.  This is especially true in the case of people like myself who don’t make any money from it.  Well, I found the following article and thought it very worthy of passing on.

Let me know in the comments here on landyvlad.net whether you have other favourite sources, or problems with any of those listed in the article. Cheers.

How to Find free High Quality Stock Images free for commercial use

My NBN non-event

My current internet speed, on a ADSL2+  connection, is typically a blistering 1 Mbps.  Yep just the one Megabit per second.  Jealous much?

The NBN website rollout data for my northern Brisbane suburb has changed a few times over the years, each time being pushed further into the future, which sadly doesn’t surprise me at all.

Recently I got home from work and found this screwed to the side of my house.

NBN Box.jpg

Yes, a box with NBN moulded into the plastic.

My wife had arrived home as the installer was leaving, and he said “It won’t work yet, has to be connected up.” and that was that.

Well to say that I was pleasantly surprised was an understatement. The prospect (though. judging from what I’ve read on various forums. by no means a certainty) of having a high speed internet connection was exciting.  The last time I’d checked the NBN rollout the site had advised me of completion by end 2018.  So it seems mine would be early.

Naturally I checked the NBN site again, and the planned availability is now shown as July-December 2019.  Apparently the people who install the boxes, and the people who connect that up to the NBN itself are entirely different and working on completely different schedules.

giphy.gif

On the upside – the technology planned for my area is HFC (Hybrid Fibre Coaxial), which is potentially at the upper end of NBN speed expectations.  Perhaps not as good as FTTP (fibre to the premises) but substantially better than FTTN (fibre to the node).

So, perhaps I might ultimately have a good connection, capable of actually streaming Amazon Prime…

 

Why not check your address now, and see what NBN technology and timeframe you might get.
https://www.nbnco.com.au/connect-home-or-business/check-your-address.html

Best of luck to you all.

Photobucket can kiss my arse !

I created the LANDYVLAD site because photobucket screwed me (and millions of others) over.

Most of the photos I had put on numerous forums disappeared overnight.  This included technical articles and trip reports on Land Rover forums, build threads on motorcycle forums, and lots more besides.

Previously webshots had done a very similar thing.

Everyone seems to be moving to Imgur now, but it can only be a matter of time before any free service stops being free… So how to get around this?

What I did

I purchased a domain name here: https://www.crazydomains.com.au/
(price varies, but from as little as $12/year)

A lite web hosting plan here:  https://netvirtue.com.au/web-hosting/economy
($3.95 / month for 1GB of space, or $5.95 for 10GB)

Installed wordpress  https://wordpress.org/
(free)

and Piwigo (photo hosting software)  http://piwigo.org/
(free)

Now I have control over everything.  As I have my own domain name I can change hosts at any time and my links to photos will still work !