How to use open source technology for activism
The above error is appears to be a common occurrence when you upgrade your Mediawiki installation from version 1.11 to 1.12. To fix this you need to have your system administrator do the following:
yum -y install php-xml
service httpd restart
The installs the XML modules into PHP. Restarting httpd allows the web server, in this case Apache, to load the new modules.
This solution came from the Mediawiki Support Desk.
How do I change the navigation bar is a common question. In a Mediawiki wiki it is a simple task if you know where to go. To edit the navigation bar or sidebar, as it is actually named, go to Mediawiki:Sidebar and edit this page.
Here is what you see when you first edit this page:
* navigation
** mainpage|mainpage
** portal-url|portal
** currentevents-url|currentevents
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|help
** sitesupport-url|sitesupport
Notice the format. The first row (navigation) has 1 asterik at the beginning of the line. This is the header for the box. The subsequent lines are the links themselves. Each line starts with 2 asteriks. This syntax puts the item symbol beside the line in the sidebar. The text is then in 2 parts separated with a | (pipe). The first section is the page name or link and the second is the text to be displayed. If you are going to use an external link you must still use the | as a separator.
Lets change the sidebar to include an FAQ link and remove the donations link.
* navigation
** mainpage|mainpage
** portal-url|portal
** currentevents-url|currentevents
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|help
** FAQ|FAQ
There are more options as well beside just adding links. What if you want to add a new navigation box. In this example I will add 2 wikis managed by the Sam Adams Alliance. They are Ballotpedia.org and Judgepedia.com.
* navigation
** mainpage|mainpage
** portal-url|portal
** currentevents-url|currentevents
** recentchanges-url|recentchanges
** randompage-url|randompage
** helppage|help
** FAQ|FAQ
* links
** http://ballotpedia.org|Ballotpedia.org
** http://Judgepedia.com|Judgepedia.com
Again, if you leave out the |, the links will not display. As you can see, editing the sidebar is rather simple once you know where to go.
If you want to do something even more fancy and are comfortable with modifying CSS files, you can place an image under the text, change padding or text style. For Mediawiki 1.11 find the following segment of code in the skins/monobook/main.css file:
/*
** the navigation portlet
*/#p-navigation {
position: relative;
z-index: 3;
}
#p-navigation a {
display: block;
}
#p-navigation li.active a, #p-navigation li.active a:hover {
display: inline;
}#p-navigation .pBody {
padding-right: 0;
}#p-navigation li.active a, #p-navigation li.active a:hover {
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
}
Website backups go hand in had with security. They are security for a disaster or if you website gets hacked. You should make regular backups of your website. This applies not only to websites, but blogs, Joomla and Mediawiki sites.
Most hosting companies do not do backups for you. They backup the server installation, but leave you on your own for your blog. The better hosting companies will do periodic backups of your websites. If anyone know hosting companies that do or don’t provide backups please add them in the comments. I am talking about the basic hosting services that many bloggers and simple websites use. Siteground does weekly backups, while Hostmonster, Dreamhost, and Cyberwurx do not.
To do a backup, you usually have 2 options with most hosting company control panels. These 2 methods are as follows:
My recommendations for backups would be to do a full backup after you have your website completely setup and then again once a quarter. I would then recommend doing a website only backup monthly unless you make many changes to your website on a regular basis. This does not count frequent posting updates. I would then do the website backup at least weekly or whenever a large number of changes are made. Lastly, I would recommend backup up the database at least weekly. If you post multiple times a day you may want to make backups daily or find a service that does it for you.
To make these backups faster, more reliable, and quickly accessible, allow the backups to run locally on the hosting server. When it is complete, download them to you local computer.
I’ve finally decided to start a technology blog. I have had friends encourage me to do this for a while. My intent will be to blog about what I do to setup open source technology in my work to help with political activism. I will blog mostly about the following open source packages and topics:
Hosted by Sam Adams Alliance - Disclaimers
Powered by FireStats
