19. Put a photo of your pet on the wiki

A wiki is a type of web site which is edited collaboratively. That is, anyone with access can edit any page of a wiki, and add new pages.

It's great for sharing information between staff of an organisation, or for developing documentation. Wikis keep a record of all edits made to a page, so it's possible to see who added what, and even to reserse edits.

The most notable wiki is WikiPedia, an online encyclopedia. However, wikis can be used for a number of purposes.

Today you'll learn how to resize and save a photo for the web, and put a photo onto the wiki 'pet's page'.

Preparing your photo

When preparing an image for the web, it's important that you save it in the correct format, and at an appropriate size. Otherwise, someone may not be able to view it, or it may take too long to download on a typical home internet connection. The photos out of a digital camera or scanner will usually be too high a resolution for a web page, so they'll require reducing.

First, you'll need to find a digital photo of your pet (or someone else's, if you don't have one). If you have a digital camera, you can simply use a photo from that. If you have a printed photo, you'll need to scan it instead. Scanners are available at the library.

Note: You can use your favourite photo editing programs. I recommend MS Picture Manager.

To resize your photo

• Open the photo you want to resize.
• Click on File, and then choose Export
• On the right side, choose Browse under "Export selected files to".
• Now a new window will come up and you want to create a new folder for your web images (unless you already have this folder created). Click on "Create new folder" and type in name of your folder eg. "Web Images", then click on OK and Open.
• Click on the down arrow under "Export with this file format", select JPEG file interchange Format (*.jpeg)
• Click on the down arrow under "Export using this size", select Web - Small 448 x 336 px, then click OK.

Put your photo onto the wiki

• Log into VU Wikibrary with your Google Account.
• Locate the Pet's page on the wiki and edit it using Edit page
• Click on Insert, and then choose Image
• Click on the Browse button and locate where you have saved your photo
• Click on Add Image and Save

OR

• If you want to create your own page, click on Create new page and insert your image into it.

Note: If you are unable to login to the VU Wikibrary by your Google account, chances are that your Google account hasn't been associated with VU email address. Now you can have several options to choose:

• Associate VU email with your Google account, or
• Advise the 23things team your gmail address and we will invite you to the VU Wikibrary, or
• Use the 23 things generic account.

Your task

1. Add a photo to the VU Wikibrary
2. Blog about your experience with Wikis

How to associate VU email address with your Google account

• Sign in to manage your Google account
• Click on the "Edit" link next to "Personal Information"
• Enter your VU email address to "Add an additional email address" and click on "Save"
• Once added, Google sends a confirmation message to authenticate that the address is actually yours.
• Follow the link in the email Google sent you and log into Google again.

Resources

• Wikipedia page for Wiki
• Help: Create Pages
• Help: Page Actions
• Article: "Wikipedia and the meaning of truth" (Technology Review)

Alternate tools

• Wetpaint
• Wikispaces
• Wik.is (owned by MindTouch)