Collabarative documents

I notice that from time to time we are invited to contribute various documents to the ThereminWorld website.

There are some Web 2.0 sites that could permit the creation of collaborative documents by ThereminWorld members.

I am aware of three sites worth mentioning: Writely (http://writely.com) - a fairly complete online word processor recently acquired by Google, Zoho Writer (http://www.zohowriter.com/) - also fully featured but doesn't like my preferred browser, and Writeboard (http://www.writeboard.com/) - which is very basic and straight forward to use. I like it the best of the three I have looked at.

All that would be required would be a means of making Writeboard passwords available to members only.

Interesting idea. Kind of like a Wiki for approved members (or say members who reach a certain level of "points"). I'll check it out -thanks!

Cool idea, This brought Wiki to my mind too. I think Wiki's the easiet and most felxible way to go.
Might be a great way to start hashing out the FAQ's Jason's been wanting to do for a while.

Yeah, it's kind of like a roll-your-own one-page-wiki without all the scary complexity.

You can monitor it via RSS, and once the page reaches the end of the development cycle just export it as html and drop it into the template for your website.

If you want to have a mess-about with one, I set up one as a sand-box here:

http://123.writeboard.com/9d339962b82a67abd

The password is, rather unimaginatively: topsecret

(I'll be watching it on rss, and will kill it if it gets abused.)

Gordon

Some Wiki info.:

open source wiki,
http://www.openwiki.com/

an example using it in a Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) implementation,
http://www.codeproject.com/asp/wiki.asp

hth!

Wow - that's one of the best CodeProject articles I've read in a long long time. Usually they're just a few lines of random though and not much substance. Thanks for the pointer! I'll be looking hard at how we can use this in the new ThereminWorld portal. Writeboard looks very promising too. Thanks for all the great ideas guys!

Jason, my "big project" - Internet Lodge - (oddly enough I must have been starting it about the same time you were starting up TW) is in the process of transferring to a Community Server (http://communityserver.org/) based system, which integrates forums, private messages, slideshows, polls, file archives and blogs into a single entity. It's pretty neat. I have also introduced them to Writeboard, and they seem to like it.

At the moment we're still figuring out how to make best use of it all, and the blog aspect is turning out to be more useful than one would have thought; not only by increasing the scope of our virtual world to include personal space (to get to know members as individuals) as well as group space and data space (i.e. the forums and archives) but also as a way to differentiate postings that invite comment rather than discussion and as a place to publish project diaries for both individual and group projects.

You know, I've seriously considered using Community Server 2.0. The problem is that I don't think we make near enough income to support the licensing costs. It would also require some extensive modification to get the full feature set I need. Still, their forums and blogs are top-notch - it's a great package overall.

The other nasty thing I'm trying to work around is that GoDaddy (our new host) doesn't allow you to install apps in the root of your site's enlistment. I can get away with general .NET pages, but if they need anything like write permission to that folder, my understanding is that I'd need to install them in a subfolder. It's a minor thing for users, but kind of a pain to deal with.

Please don't use CS2 - it's not terribly mac friendly - I'm having to leap back and forth between Safari and Firefox like an idiot to get best use of it.

Additionally the user interface is complicated enough to require extensive user documentation, and there is none worth speaking of. There is plenty of documentation for the administrators, and the community server help forums are admin oriented. First thing we had to do was set up our own self-help forum to deal with that.

Also it throws up server errors from time to time.

I prefer using Bariliant Portal - it's almost totally platform agnostic (except for that weird thing about posting images to the forums,) has just the features I need and requires no more documentation than the message formatting options (and that posting where you mentioned how to do images,) the help desk is always helpful and available (except when you jet off to Egypt on a company jolly,) and it seems pretty rock-solid.

My point was that the blogs are A Good Thing - something worth considering for the development of Theremin World as a community.

Good to know about CS 2.0 and Macs. I was just doing a little research, and it seems they've addressed the installation problems with GoDaddy. It's still a gruelling 57-step manual process, but it [i]would[/i] be possible.

I think in the end though, I'll be happier with BP2.0. I'll be able to add exactly what I want and I won't have to pay anyone to license anything. Plus, it's a great learning experience.

So now that the kids are in bed, I'm going to settle down with some green tea and brush up ADO.NET and databinding. So much geeking to do, so little time :)