raising the barn

…in which I find some of the pieces are starting to feel a bit heavy

This post shares its title with the current task list over at dekalbowiki. My last two weeks have been largely devoted to the heavy lifting of whacking the MediaWiki installation into place, reimplementing the WordPress look and feel, and starting to upload the first content. Oh, and hacking my way through some css to implement the hoverable icon on the home page pointing to the Neoteric Ensemble “book” project.

Since I haven’t yet opened the wiki up (no robots.txt yet) or enabled Google stats the dekalbowiki site is spam free. I’m sure that won’t last long. The simple protections are in place, but there’s bound to be some door somewhere I haven’t nailed shut. The same goes for the blog pages, where I haven’t installed an Akismet key yet, so I’m expecting trackback spam any day. Still, everything is starting to gel.

There’s only one significant technical challenge left, which is figuring out how to do a common login between the wiki and blog pages. Maybe it’s enough to manage to allow users to create the separate entries in one shot, but I dream of a common database and single sign-on. Maybe when we get a real administrator….

I reckon in another month we’ll be ready to send out the invitations. Meanwhile if you have stumbled this far, check out the first collection.

—Cross-posted from dekalborama.com 2012-01-20