Today at YAPC::NA, Luke Closs gave a talk on Hacktastic Wiki Tricks including demonstrations of efficient wiki editing in wikrad, updates on blog views in wikis, and wiki-driven test automation. I use wikrad for gardening, searching, tagging, and very fast wiki browsing. It's awesome to be able to navigate and edit with vim commands, especially with real-time collaboration through sharing a screen with others. Luke demonstrates wikrad in a screencast, take a look!
It is usually easy to find Luke because goes to conferences and does stuff like this: User Generated Circus
Kirsten Jones is also at YAPC and on Wednesday she will give a talk on Hydra, a tool to put multiple "faces" on wiki content. Hydra is in use right now for the Perl Foundation web site, which keeps its contents in a wiki, but has the look of a non-editable web site. Kirsten describes the project, originally developed at one of our Wiki Wednesday Hackathons,
Social applications like wikis are great for encouraging collaboration, lowering barriers to entry, and allowing both technical and non-technical people to work together to generate content -- but they're not always the best way to *present* that content. People often want to use a wiki to create and maintain information, but then deliver it some other way, outside of the original wiki environment.
It's very slick! This, and tools like it, will become more and more important as wikis become a popular way to develop content. Yet I think the point of Hydra is that a wiki doesn't have to bear the entire burden of publishing and serving that content.
Casey West gave his "Abuse Perl" talk today, and on Tuesday will talk about Mochikit.
Bill Odom, who I also work with at Socialtext, will be giving the closing keynote for the conference. I don't know what he'll talk about, but what I like about his talks is that he makes sense and doesn't BS. Not to imply that anyone else *does*. It's just that Bill is often the Voice of Just Plain Common Sense in a refreshing way. So whatever he has to say about Perl is likely to be good.
I've found some good notes on Larry Wall's keynote speech from Jesse Stay - and I'm hoping to follow more liveblogging from YAPC over the next few days. I notice they're having a hackathon on June 28 and 29th, after the conference ends. I bet that will be amazing.
Liz Henry
liz@socialtext.com
http://socialtext.com/blog/27
http://bookmaniac.net
