The WikiStudent testing site went live last month, and I’ve finally decided not to continue with this blog anymore as most of the discussion is happening on the test site. (My other websites have also been horribly neglected these past four months, so stopping this blog will at least free up half an hour a day!) I will do one more post here, this weekend, with more info about the test site, how you can help, and when it will be made public.
Last week, after being caught in the rain without an umbrella, as soon as I was at the PC I went online to shop for one. Here’s what I ordered:
A FireFox umbrella - how cool is that! Everyone I showed the pic to wanted one as well so I put in a bulk order to save on shipping. It was pricy (the total order came to over 100 Pounds) but worth it, considering that the proceeds go to the Mozilla foundation and this is a brilliant way to promote FireFox 
If I had my way, everybody would use FireFox as their browser. Currently on average 20% of my visitors use FireFox which is just shocking…
A few weeks ago I mentioned blocking a bunch of spammer countries. I recently carried this out and it has been quite effective. Sometimes I’m tempted to block access to my websites to all non-FireFox users, but that would be too harsh, considering some people browse from their cellphones.
What I might do instead is this: Order dozens of FireFox umbrellas and re-sell them from my websites, and display monthly statistics of how many people are using FireFox. Just another one of my ideas…
Since the initial testing revealed (from two sources) that students want to interact with other students doing a module, I dug around and found this very suitable ContributionCredits extension. This is what it produces at the bottom of every wiki page:
The above snippet was taken from the ENN102E page. You see a heading “Contributors to this page” with usernames of everyone who ever edited that page (except for admin).
So that’s a neat solution for indicating who is taking which modules. You can also click on a person’s username to find out more about them (what they are currently studying, what work they’re doing on the wiki, view their photo…).
In the past, I had a section where you could insert your name if you were doing a particular module, but that was a manual process, so not many people went to the effort. This extension is ideal because your username is added automatically the moment you save your changes to a page.
Some more computer books arrived yesterday: Advanced Web metrics with Google Analytics (written by someone who works at Google) and Building Findable websites.
I still have to finish my How Wikipedia works book, which totals to 885 pages of reading. Plus I want to re-read MediaWiki, and Don’t make me think (for the third time).
At least I now know I have all the research material necessary, and won’t need to buy another book for the WikiStudent project. (I’d better not - where will I find the time to read everything?!)