Saturday, March 1, 2008

Setting Up and Working On a Wiki

Setting up a wiki is simple, and like the name suggests, quick! In fact the Peanut Butter Wiki site claims one can set up a PBwiki in just 30 seconds. I thought I’d test PBwiki’s claim and surprisingly, it was that quick! It was also free. As I chose the education option, my site is without advertising, whereas wikispaces charges $5 a month to block the advertising. For me, the most time-consuming thing about setting up a wiki was choosing a name.

Before visiting PBwiki (which I did because I noticed Joyce Valenza ‘s wiki address), I had already set up a wiki using Wikispaces to begin a group assignment. Along with the other members of my group, I muddled along trying to create a virtual handout for our project. I was frustrated with wikispaces because the editing tools were clumsy and limited, lacking options for the basics like font color and size. PBwiki has just updated their editing software to make it efficient and to offer more options. They offer a tutorial on the editing tools by Ramit Sethi, one of the cofounders of PBwiki, which I found helpful. The goal was to make the editing more like what you find in MSWord, thus making it more user-friendly. I like the undo and redo buttons, which wikispaces did not have, as well as how easy it is to use the plug-ins to insert widgets. I also like how PBwiki sent me seven follow-up emails with tips on how to use wikis. It took about an hour and a half to transfer the work we had done on wikispaces to PBwiki and to edit and polish but the new look was worth it. You can compare the look of the two sites by visiting 2learn2gether.wikispaces.com and 2learn2gether.pbwiki.com.

In working on the PBwiki today, I inadvertently lost everything on the home page! This turned out to be a good thing as I ended up learning how to delete the changes I had made and restore the page. For those who are interested, go to view pages (at the bottom center of your page), select your page and select “delete” for the changes you don’t want. Voila-it was that easy!

3 comments:

Chris said...

Glad you enjoyed your experience with PBwiki, Elizabeth! Let us know if we can be of help.

ms. ippen said...

How cool that the helpful folks at PBwiki appreciate the free advertising enough to keep track of your experience.

Cindy said...

I too liked the user friendly pbwiki. I even accessed their help section and was chastised for making a spelling mistake when I asked a question. I had to chuckle but I eventually had my question answered.
I had initially signed up for wikispaces but as I read about wikis I came to the same conclusion as you Elizabeth, that pbwiki was the way to go!