Kian Ryan (.NET, Android, Geekery)

The “At This Space” exhibition is opening on the 26th April, at 5pm. I’m invited to the private viewing and you’re not, so neerrrr. If you want to try and bribe your way in (there’ll be free drinks, and people, and cheese[1]), then drop Cat Ashton a line and she’ll try and weasel you in. Cat’s work is being exhibited there as part of the exhibition.

Otherwise please, please, please drop by Tuesday to Saturday, 10am til 6pm. These are young, upcoming, budding artists who need all the support they can get. Hell, one of them may even be the next Henri Cartier-Bresson or Richard Avedon. The exhibition is being held at the rather fancy-pants Urban Splash location in Castlefield:

Urban Splash (Mooch)
Worsley Street
M15 4LD

I was there today helping put up some of the work, and occupying space at other times. The exhibition looks great, the space is superb and there’s some excellent work on the walls. All very much worth your time.

[1] I may be lying about the cheese.

Wikis are wonderful collaborative tools for project development teams. They’re lightweight, straightforward and usually fit in well with the way most developers think most of the time.

But occasionally, just occasionally one of your developers may be something of a black sheep. Maybe they don’t like the way a certain part of your corporate wiki looks, or want some customised behaviour for getting rid of irrelevant parts of the page. Maybe they want to improve their productivity (I know, an alien concept).

Take for an example a project I’m currently working on. One of our wiki pages is a rolling todo list, where new items are added under various categories as additional <li< elements in a list and as tasks are completed they’re struck out with a <del> tag. As you can imagine, after a while, this page has become something of a swamp of strikethroughs and it makes it very hard to judge the amount of work remaining.

In some cases, custom stylesheets may be adequate. But in other cases, you may need a little more flexibility. “User Scripts” are a recently modern concept that have been popularised through the Greasemonkey Firefox extension for use with common web application such as Flickr, Facebook and Gmail. User scripts provide flexibility above and beyond the scope of the original application.

So why not apply this to wikis as well? So today, I wrote the world’s smallest user script to hide the deleted lines in the wiki:

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("del").parent().parent("li").hide();
});

You’ll notice that I’m using JQuery rather than vanilla Javascript. JQuery is my library of choice and there’s no reason why you can’t use yours either. There are a few solutions for loading JQuery at runtime, my preference is to simply copy the compressed version into the header of the script. Since the script is loaded locally, the additional 50k is neither here nor there.

For the Safari lovers, there’s also GreaseKit (Mac OS X only alas), which provides similar functionality. I’m currently using this since I’ve given up on Firefox for a while (I blame Caius).

Now I’ve got a cleared down wiki and I can focus a bit on what I’ve got left to do. You can too. Or comment with an idea for novel wiki functionality.