Archive for September 10th, 2007

Wiki Tip - Aggregate Pages

Lately Wiki’s have taken over my life - my team at work uses one, I’ve started one to share content from Ars Technica’s Boardroom and I’m even tempted to install TiddlyWiki on my USB drive!

For work, I’ve been using the wiki to store my meeting notes. I take my tagged notes and then transfer the most important ones over to the wiki. Great for sharing and for the if-I-get-hit-by-a-bus scenario! The problem is that the same subject matter can span multiple meetings and I like to break up my notes by meeting. So I began searching for a way to aggregate a bunch of single pages into one gigantic one. After a lot of searching I found a way to do it, unfortunately I lost the link but I do remember the instructions.

Below you’ll find the steps needed to create an aggregate page. The examples use the Boardroom Wiki.

  1. Create a new page. This page will become the aggregate page.
  2. Find the title of the pages you wish to aggregate. To do this I normally just copy the link and take the portion of the URL after the title=. For example the title of the following link http://www.theboardroomwiki.com/index.php?title=Business_Cards is “Business_Cards.”
  3. Edit the aggregate page. Insert the following tag: {{:PAGETITLE}}. Be sure to replace “PAGETITLE” with the title of the page you’ve selected. Example: {{:Business_Cards}}.
  4. Click the save button and voila!

My main issue is that there seems to be no way to group the individual pages on the aggregate page. I would expect the aggregate page to use the title from each individual page. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be case. Sure I could create my own group by adding a header before each instance of the aggregate tag, but this is a pain.

Another problem I have is the manual nature of this tag. Each time I want to add a page to the aggregate page, I have to do it manually. I’m not sure what an elegant solution to this problem would look like but I’m sure there’s one out there.

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Monday, September 10th, 2007

Organization, Programming 1 Comment