In a previous post I praised Deki Wiki, the awesome wiki application platform from Mindtouch, which we use for an Intranet here at the Alumnae Association. Now I have put my money where my mouth is and developed a web site of my own with Deki Wiki (Deki is Japanese for "smart" and Wiki is Hawiian for "fast" ). The site is called "You Know You Are From..." and is located at youknowyouarefrom.wik.is.
It is a wiki which celebrates the uniqueness of the different corners of the world or at least the United States of America, for now until additional countries are added.
In an age of franchises, fast food chains, big box mega stores, media conglomerates, look-alike shopping malls and the general omnipresent sameness there is still a lot that makes us stand apart from the rest of the crowd. The stuff that makes places special. Things like food, names, accents, pronunciations, attitudes, jokes, stores, restaurants, personalities and one of a kind landmarks. Unfortunately many of these things only continue to exist in our memories, so the purpose of the site is to gather those memories and observations in a web based collective scrap book.
Take a look at the Maryland and Boston pages as examples. If you are from either of these places some of those items may have made you nostalgic or laugh out loud. If you are from somewhere else, you have similar memories or knowledge of unique characteristics of your hometown, city, state or even country.
You won't (or shouldn't) find mention of Chilies, Bennigan's, Wendy's, Starbucks, Costco, The Gap or Wal-Mart on my site. If you do, delete it. That's right, edit the page because the web site is a wiki that anyone can edit (right after you register, of course). This wiki is about what makes a place and the people that live there different and unique from anywhere else. Write about the people, shops, parks, bars, bakeries, quirks, sayings, practices and landmarks that you are not likely to find anywhere else.
In addition to lists of what makes a place unique, you will also find maps, photos and links to blogs, web sites, videos, and books about that particular place so that you can explore a city or region even further.
You can very easily and very quickly create your own free Deki Wiki web site at Wik.is, the web hosting service provided by Mindtouch. For $99 a year you can open a Pro account which will give you 10 GB instead of 100 MB with the free account, plus you can further customize the appearance of the site, add advertisements and use your own domain name.
Unfortunately, if you use your own domain name the Google Maps feature is broken, because Google requires a unique code, called an API key, to be used for their maps with every unique domain. I learned this the hard way. I use maps on almost every page of the wiki so this caused some frustration. However, Mindtouch offers another mapping extension from Windows Live which works great except in Safari on Mac OS X. I'm a Mac user and while I use Firefox as my main browser, if I am not going to be editing or doing any web development work I turn to Safari because it is simply faster at rendering web pages. Also, Safari is the only browser available on the iPhone and iTouch iPod. Therefore I changed my domain to a redirect to the wik.is domain name. I sent a message to Mindtouch regarding this issue and hopefully they will resolve it in a future upgrade.
Along with Wik.is, another great service is Name.com. They are a domain registrar. Domains cost $5.99 a year and they have a great control panel and easily integrate with Google Apps so that you can have email, calendars, and Google Docs on your domain for free because Wik.is does not provide email.
Why a wiki instead of blog, forum or CMS (content management system)? I could have possibly used those other formats, but I wanted the site to be open for others to contribute to because I have only live a few locations. With a wiki it is very easy to add new pages and all changes are tracked. I can quickly revert back to a previous version and I can see at a glance what was changed when by who. Another benefit with Deki Wiki is that I can easily integrate content from around the web to compliment my web site.
How did I come up with the idea for the web site? It is getting harder and harder to come up with an original idea or niche for a web site. My mom had recently sent me via email a couple "you know you are from" lists for Maryland and Florida, the two places I had grown up in. The lists were funny, nostalgic and very true. I thought that every place must have unique places, landmarks, sayings, and so forth and I did not find a similar site on line. The lists are every where, but no one has attempted to collect them all in one place or encourage people to write their own list.
So, feel free to create an account and contribute to youknowyouarefrom.wik.is let others know what makes your hometown, city,, state or country and the people that live there stand out from the rest.
While the site may not be directly related to the Alumnae Association, hopefully you will find it fun, interesting and possibly interesting when traveling or trying to figure out why someone is the way they are. It may just be where they are from.