Putting a pet on a wiki

This is the most difficult of the 23 Things tasks to explain. Resizing and saving images for the web is a complicated task, and it requires using software that many people, including me, had never used before. I chose to provide instructions for Macromedia Fireworks because everybody here has a license for it already, whereas we don't have any site license for Photoshop.

When creating images for the web you have to understand the inter-relationship of capture resolution, which is either the megapixels on your camera or the setting on your scanner, the resolution of the final image, and the relationship this has with how large the image is on screen when viewed in a web browser. Web browsers ignore resolution information (such as 300dpi) and instead size things according to the number of pixels, a concept which can also be difficult to understand.

It all makes for a pretty difficult task, and even if my step-by-step instructions did help I doubt that they gave any insight into why it was done like this or how it could be adapted to other situations where you need to create graphics for the web. While I told people to resample their image, I didn't explain what this was and I didn't cover how to crop the image, so it's the right shape, sharpen the image, but not too much, or do any sort of colour corrections or manipulations, which are often necessary with images direct from cameras.

The second part of this task wasn't too much easier. I am well aware that the wiki is new to most people, and along with this it also has a strange markup language and a not-too-intuitive method for uploading photos. If I had to think of a more difficult thing to do on a wiki I'd struggle - perhaps creating and formatting a table would be it.

The wiki's strange mark-up language was intended to be simple, though this simplicity only exists in comparison to HTML, and only in the minds of the technically literate. In comparison to modern, dare I say 'Web 2.0' tools which use WYSIWYG interfaces such as Blogger, Wordpress and GMail, formatting text in the wiki is horrendous. Inserting images is worse.

I'd much rather use a wiki that uses WYSIWYG editing, with a formatting toolbar instead of markup codes, for editing. I know that it's possible - I've worked on a similar thing myself. I've also used the wiki software Confluence, which comes close, though it imposes a heirarchical structure on the site that's just not wiki. There is one being developed called Ogham, and it seems to have an online demo, but it's either taking me to the wrong place or I just can't work out how to use it. Presumably one could also add a modification on to Mediawiki - what we use - to add this functionality, though I can't see that going very smoothly.