This Monday morning found me being introduced to two new office procedures - regular blog posts, though I was told I can do them slowly and whenever I like, and an office wiki. Don't get me wrong, I am flattered, I can write my own stuff about things in the office - it can get quite exciting sometimes - but phew, two big ideas at once?

Actually, both the blog and the wiki are great ideas. So far so good on the first part of my first blog post. And on to writing about writing into a wiki for the first time.

When the wiki was passed on to me, it was already installed with a main page. I was shown how to log in (no problem) and how to change the main page. Because this already had some stuff in it, I could see how it was written, how to write a main heading, a subheading, etc and copy the method. So, a main heading is like this:

== This is a main heading==

A subheading uses === either side, and a subsubheading uses ====. I must admit going down below three is a little repetitious, but a bullet list works quite well to separate items, by using asterisks, like this:

* A bullet list item

Oh and if I want to put anything into bold or italic, there are the buttons or I can use two single quotes for italic or three for bold, like this:

''this will be italic''

'''this will be bold'''

These are quicker than the buttons and as quick as turning italic and bold on and off with Ctrl I and Ctrl B.

When the page is saved, all this formatting appears. And once I reached four main headings, the contents block appears automatically -- heee heee.

Links are easier than HTML as well, which I have to admit is a relief. External links are enclosed in one pair of square brackets; internal links are enclosed in two pairs. You can specify the words you want to click on if you want. For example, a wiki link to our external website will be written in like this:

[http://www.reedmace.com Reedmace Publishing]

OK, there are two more things that I think are crucial and then you could have a good bash at your own wiki: creating new pages and preventing getting lost in your own wiki!

I wanted to make a new page for some travel arrangements. This was done by putting in the internal link for the new page, like this:

[[Travel | Katharine's travel]]

The page Travel was created just like that, and the words "Katharine's travel" were clickable to go to that page (it showed as red rather than blue because I hadn't yet written in the page. I clicked on the page link, and went straight into writing all the departures and arrivals for all the flights and train legs on the page, with booking refs and links to the maps I've created and uploaded to the wiki. I saved the page (very important) and now all the details are there for me to see, build upon if necessary and print for the day.

About how not to get lost in your wiki: at the top of every new page, give a summary of what it is all about and use the chance here to insert links to other pages. For example, at the top of the Travel page, I put a paragraph about how this is the page for current and old travel arrangements for all of us (with links for our names to our own jot pad pages just to be helpful) and about info on particular meetings being stored on the Meetings page, with a link again. These links avoid having to click on the Main Page in the side menu and start travelling through the wiki all over again. (There is the search facility but our wiki isn't big enough for me to need it yet.)

So great ideas can come in pairs. The wiki allows us all to know what is going on and how it is being done. And I can spend a Friday hour stopping at the water cooler, as they say, and say "Hey, did you know this? It's fantastic!"

I don't think I'll will be beating this for new ideas in the near future!