Screaming Coder

It’s a great day for programming (and such). Little bit of sun, little bit of cloud cover, a cool breeze blowing in over my shoulder (in a cruel twist of fate, good programming weather is almost identical to good beach weather).

So I finaly got motivated to work on something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time. That is, create an address online where we can gather all our thoughts and plans regarding our home church. We’ve sometimes talked about stuff (eg: that list) and thought it would be good to have somewhere online where we could record what we came up with. Also we’ve agreed it would be nice to be able to let everyone in on what someone is planning on talking about ahead of time so we can all come a bit more prepared to contribute to the various discussions.

Being a programmer I immediately thought “wiki” (ala Wikipedia). Being an avid live-journaler, elPoncho suggested something of a similar nature to livejournal.com (ie: some kind of blog that we can all contribute to). Both have two of the most important ingredients I can think of – user contributed content plus RSS/email notification of updates – though with slightly different focuses. A wiki is more about creating structured content, with the *ability* for use as a communication medium (via user “talk” pages). A blog on the other hand is more about communicating ideas in real time, with the *ability* to create kind-of structured content in the form of “pages”. I do think though that blogs tend to do the structured content thing a bit better than wikis can do communication.

Given the choice I think that, for our purposes, timely communication would be more important than the ability to create structured content – at least initialy, if not ultimately. So I think we’ll probably prefer the communal church journal with the odd page of content at first, and maybe “grow into” the wiki if we start doing more with content. In any case I’ve set them both up so we can see how it goes, experiment with both for a while maybe.

The wiki is powered by MediaWiki, and can be found here. Feel free to sign up and poke around and have a go adding content or whatever. The blog is powered by Wordpress 2.0, and can be found here. Again, join up, add entries, go nuts!

Note that both have RSS feeds (the MediaWiki one is in the “Recent Changes” section).

With any luck, this just might inspire the return of something a bit like the much missed “freedom project” with a wider community. Vee shall see.