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[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

I'm attaching a set of follow-ups to a poll I posted to the Facebook owners group in May.


Eventually, the wiki will get a "News" section to track this but for now I'll just link to each update in a reply to this thread.


Here's the overview:

• Travis Fabel, the site owner, figured out how to separate its hosting from his other web properties, making the site easier to manage. I'd like to help organize a "trust" to manage the site collectively so no individual can take over, it stays public, and we can collect donations to defray costs.

• There's a new "visual" editor which syntax highlights the wiki markup and makes it easier to generate markup. It's not the one I wanted but it was easy to install.

• Mobile layout is now more robust, but the extension does mess with your preferred style for now.

• There are helpers for things like adding standardized warning messages around dangerous steps. I'll be invoking more of those.

• There's a specific category for quick reference pages suitable for loading on your phone.

• There are categories that help organize procedures.

• I'm pulling all procedures into separate pages, especially ones worth reading on your phone, optimized for using on your phone. The procedures will still show up in the Service Manual via "transclusion" so they only need updating in one place.

• Generally, the site will shift to a more "bottom-up" / "inverted" writing structure, with small pages being the norm, and huge "books" like the Service Manual will shift gradually to being compositions of smaller articles.

• I added a bunch of classic texts I learned from in the Navy to the electrical skills section. They're free via the Internet Archive.

[DPsSRnSD]

I currently don't seem to be able to save my Appearance Preferences for the Unofficial Manual back to anything but the default Vector, which is difficult for me to read. I also can't read most of the post above, but do have an emailed copy so I know the contents. Undoubtedly fallout from the transition?

[MrDude_1]

Heres his post without the color tags so you can read it: (its also a show of how WISIWYG doesnt always work as intended)
I'm attaching a set of follow-ups to a poll I posted to the Facebook owners group in May.


Eventually, the wiki will get a "News" section to track this but for now I'll just link to each update in a reply to this thread.


Here's the overview:

• Travis Fabel, the site owner, figured out how to separate its hosting from his other web properties, making the site easier to manage. I'd like to help organize a "trust" to manage the site collectively so no individual can take over, it stays public, and we can collect donations to defray costs.

• There's a new "visual" editor which syntax highlights the wiki markup and makes it easier to generate markup. It's not the one I wanted but it was easy to install.

• Mobile layout is now more robust, but the extension does mess with your preferred style for now.

• There are helpers for things like adding standardized warning messages around dangerous steps. I'll be invoking more of those.

• There's a specific category for quick reference pages suitable for loading on your phone.

• There are categories that help organize procedures.

• I'm pulling all procedures into separate pages, especially ones worth reading on your phone, optimized for using on your phone. The procedures will still show up in the Service Manual via "transclusion" so they only need updating in one place.

• Generally, the site will shift to a more "bottom-up" / "inverted" writing structure, with small pages being the norm, and huge "books" like the Service Manual will shift gradually to being compositions of smaller articles.

• I added a bunch of classic texts I learned from in the Navy to the electrical skills section. They're free via the Internet Archive.

[nevetsyad]

Brian,

Can you include a section for fixing a stuck contactor? It was killing me until I saw this post:

http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=7963.0

I think it could help many people in the future.

Steven

[MrDude_1]

I currently don't seem to be able to save my Appearance Preferences for the Unofficial Manual back to anything but the default Vector, which is difficult for me to read. I also can't read most of the post above, but do have an emailed copy so I know the contents. Undoubtedly fallout from the transition?

I dont believe I installed any appearance options besides the default, a modified version of Vector I made.
Brian is putting some mods in to allow for mobile views along with the desktop... I think we can offer a few brighter options now. Honestly I never change any sites from their default so I didnt think much about it.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

Dang. Sorry about the format. I’ll try to fix it soon. The forum editor has some crazy bugs when I do anything slightly fancy.


EDIT: it's fixed. But I don't think this rules out WYSIWYG editors - Wikipedia's is extremely well tested compared to this crappy forum software, and has good fallbacks like the editor we're using for the zero manual right now.

[MrDude_1]

Brian,

Can you include a section for fixing a stuck contactor? It was killing me until I saw this post:

http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=7963.0

I think it could help many people in the future.

Steven

One of the great things about it being a wiki is anyone, including yourself, can add information that could be useful to others.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

There’s definitely a preference saving bug which I can’t trace down yet since I’m only using file sync methods and can’t log in to the server yet.

[DPsSRnSD]

Okay. I can "preview" the other appearances but clicking on save reverts to the default.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

This thread is not about specific wiki content requests. This is about site strategy.

That said, I’ll add requests to my queue.

Bear in mind that how it gets integrated may not match how you think about it because I have to make sure that explanations can be found across a variety of perspectives. That’s one reason for this set of changes.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

I'm going to try debugging the preference-saving issue by iterating through all the new extensions, turning them off until it works. Thankfully, I have a shortlist of extensions that do use preferences, which hopefully will save some time.

[nevetsyad]

Brian,

Can you include a section for fixing a stuck contactor? It was killing me until I saw this post:

http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=7963.0

I think it could help many people in the future.

Steven

One of the great things about it being a wiki is anyone, including yourself, can add information that could be useful to others.

I didn’t realize permissions were there for us to all assist. I created an account, but it looks like everything so far has been contributed by Brian.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

I didn’t realize permissions were there for us to all assist. I created an account, but it looks like everything so far has been contributed by Brian.

Yes, I definitely took over the content and editorial effort and have set the tone for it. I have a background with technical writing and a disciplined set of skills around it around my two decades combined of nuclear technician and software development experience.

I need to be clearer that contributions can be messy in terms of wording as long as I can clean it up. It's easier for me to clean up someone's work than to do the initial entry where I'm not the direct witness and have to read online posts to interpret.

You can always use your user talk page as a scratch space when you don't know where to put something.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

FYI the preferences bug does not have a clear cause yet despite me disabling a bunch of plugins and turning on many debug flags.

I’m still investigating and will update once resolved.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

FYI the preferences bug does not have a clear cause yet despite me disabling a bunch of plugins and turning on many debug flags.

I’m still investigating and will update once resolved.

I finally figured out how to see the errors that were blocking preference-saving. The offending extension is now disabled so you can set your preferred theme and other settings freely.

Sorry about the trouble! Plenty of content has been churned through lately, at least.