Ryan's Journal

I never would have thought wikis or blogs could actually be useful work tools. Should those words mean nothing to you, follow the link and note that some people would consider what you're reading a blog, or just read on.

We're using a wiki at work for documentation and a blog for recording what work we've actually done. A wiki -- definitely not my favorite piece of software, but useful nonetheless as a a quick 'n dirty hypertext tool -- allows you to write up some information in plain text and transforms certain sequences of characters into something else when redisplayed. The strength or weakness of the system, depending on your programming and aesthetic senses, is the ability to create a link by making FunnyCaseRunOnWords, which end up instantiating a new page for you to write. This works pretty well for a body of documentation that could eventually be dumped out of the wiki into more formal documents (with no FunnyCasing).

The blog as a work record is also pretty cool, though without the need to really create any links, it might be nice to have a blog with the same type of plain text to HTML format conversion so I can avoid repeatedly typing out unordered list markup all the time.

In short, content rules on the web. The more of the inhuman markup you can leave to something else, the easier it is to put something useful up on the web, and the more useful the aggregate web becomes. If only it were always this easy for everyone to put real, useful information on the web...