Sunday, January 31, 2010

Fellrnr has moved to fellrnr.com

The fellrnr tips site has moved to http://fellrnr.com, so update any bookmarks you have. I won’t be taking down http://fellrnr.info (http://fellrnr.pbworks.com) any time soon, but it won’t be updated. Now I’m done migrating to the new site, I can focus on writing some new tips ;}



Technobable: If you are curious about the technical details here they are. I chose pbworks.com because it was free, has no adverts and is easy to use. The site has worked pretty well, but some of the options (custom domain support, CSS, etc) require you to pay for access. The cost of paying for a pbworks premium account is significantly more than having a flexible hosting account from someone like godaddy.com. Also, pbworks is not a true Wiki, but a simplified HTML site, which I found frustrating.

After some research I decided to go with a hosted server from godaddy.com, which costs $5/month and allows you to install a wide variety of software. I used the godaddy simplified install of MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia.org), which was remarkably easy.

Advanced configuration of MediaWiki involves editing PHP files, which is not for the non-technical. I set things up so that I’m the only editor, though I may open this up in the future.

Converting the pages from pbworks to MediaWiki involved half a day’s C# coding. The pbworks format is really based around HTML, not Wiki, so there were a lot of ‘oddities’ that crept in. (Email me if you need a copy of the code.) I was surprised just how many pages there were to convert and validate. Everything is not perfect, but it is pretty close.

The option of hosting a forum or blog within the same godaddy site is a bonus.

If you have any questions, just email me or ping me on facebook.

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