Welcome!
Welcome to my experimental Wiki page. I'm using it as a way of playing around with editing
in Wiki. Please feel free to leave your reactions to it by clicking the "Comments" box
at the top of the page, especially regarding whether the elements I'm experimenting with
(diacritics and accents, for example), display correctly on your computer.
General Thoughts on Wiki
Here are my reactions, to date, on making a Wiki:
— I don't like some of the default settings (for example, the gray-green background color),
but I don't know how to change them—or if they can be changed.
— I like the "easy edits" made possible through using Wikistyle codes, but (probably because
I'm fairly familiar with html code), I often find Wikistyle codes confusing (because they're
quite different from html).
— I like the fact that I can also use html coding in addition to Wikistyle to make
"adjustments" of one kind or another.
— My impression is that Wiki pages can be done quickly because they rely heavily on
use of templates. This is definitely convenient, but if I don't like the look of
what Wikistyle produces, making adjustments to get what I want is sometimes not easy.
Using Special Characters
I have both a PC and a Mac, but I use my Mac for most things. On a Mac, it's easy to add
"enhancements" such as accents (acute, grave, circumflex), some diacritics (cedilla, eñe,
umlaut), and certain special characters (like the en dash, em dash, superscripts, and
subscripts) Web-based materials: all I have to do is to use the appropriate Mac keystroke
combination. Examples:
accents (Mac keystrokes)
José, Mônica, Thérèse
diacritics (Mac keystrokes)
abraço, João, güle-güle
Special characters such as en dashes, em dashes, superscripts, and subscripts also have
Mac keystrokes, but they may not display correctly in all applications. Do the marks
between 1 and 51, between Peabody and have, and between her? and was display
differently for you? Do the hyphen-like marks in the first set have different lengths?
If not, what about the second group? (They use html coding.)
hyphen, en dash, em dash (Mac keystrokes)
a ten-page assignment; pages 1–51; That assignment—Ms. Scott gave it—was both
long and difficult
a ten-page assignment; pages 1–51; That assignment—Ms. Scott gave it—was both
long and difficult
Other special characters do not have Mac keystrokes (or if they do, I can't remember
them), so to show them, html coding needs to be used. Examples:
superscripts and subscripts (html coding)
E=mc2; H2O
special diacritics (html coding)
Saša; Slovenščina (s and c with hacheks)
Kağan; teşekkür (g with breve, s with cedilla)
One way to find the html coding for "unusual" characters is to do a Google search
(for example, with html Romanian characters). Here's one pretty good source:
http://webdesign.about.com/library/bl_htmlcodes.htm
Displaying Links
It's easy to display external links: just type the URL:
For internal links, the easiest thing to do is to make a Wikistyle table of contents;
it will automatically link to different sections of a Wikipage. I don't like the way
the Wikistyle toc pages look, however, so I need to find a workaround. (There's an
html code for this, but I don't, at the moment, remember it.)
Embedding Audio Files
1-30-07
It's now almost 10:30 PM, Phoenix time; late this afternoon, I worked on a short
audio greeting. I recorded the greeting and then converted it to an .mp3 file with
Audacity. I then uploaded the .mp3 to my personal website. If all goes well,
you'll be able to hear the greeting by clicking on the small, right-pointing
triangle in the mini-console below:
The URL for Audacity is http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ . If you download it,
don't forget that you also need to download the Lame MP3 Encoder. Get it by
going to this TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/bka3e .
Displaying PowerPoint Presentations
I'm still (2-22-07) working on this section.
Including Short Videos
2-20-07: 9:22 AM, Phoenix time
Earlier this morning, I was playing around with an old webcam that I'd forgotten
I had and was able to make the brief Quicktime movie shown below. To view it,
click on the right-pointing triangle in the miniconsole.
The quality of the video is only so-so, but I can probably play around with it
and make it a bit better. I can also use another webcam that I have, but not
until I relocate the installation script, which I've mislaid.
Displaying Information in a Table
In an earlier version of this page, I gave URLs for several websites. Here are
the URLs again, this time presented in a table:
| Arizona Guide: Where to Go | Where to Go in Arizona |
| Infoplease.Com: Arizona Profile | Arizona Map |
| U.S.National Park Service: The Grand Canyon | Grand Canyon information pages |
| geo-images.com | Picture Atlas: Arizona and the Southwest |
| d-oliver.net | my personal website |
| Estrella Mountain Community College | where I've been working since 2001 |
| TESOL's Arizona affiliate | a professional website that I manage |