The Dink Smallwood Solutions and its future.
Hello everyone. When Beuc gave me the dink solutions to watch over, he made a number of suggestions on how I should go about improving it. He suggested a new CMS, with content licensing established. You may have noticed the site being offline for the last two weeks or so. What happened was that I bungled an upgrade of the SPIP software that the site runs upon. I got rooted, then my VPS provider shut me down temporarily.
For a while now, I have been slowly migrating the site articles to a new site running upon MediaWiki. When I went through and looked at all the walkthroughs, many of them are incredibly poorly written, and some games have two walkthroughs for them repeating the same information! The thing about SPIP is that it is designed for online magazines/periodicals of some kind rather than a static collection of articles that aren't affected by chronology. Although Linus's Dink Wiki hasn't exactly become a bustling metropolis I decided upon MediaWiki as it supports a variety of functions that SPIP doesn't do very well such as the integration of images as well as external youtube videos through an extension. I do know that some have shied away from publishing their self-written walkthrough onto the site because of what they see as a difficult process of signing up and sharing their helpful hints.
Ultimately, I want to change it to be a community of inclusion that allows anyone to contribute by writing or editing pages on the site. As it is set up now, anyone is able to create a new article which includes all of those lurkers lurking this forum right now who don't want to sign up because they think everyone here is mentally ill.
However, the licensing requirements stipulate that all content that you submit will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. What this means is that if you have written a walkthrough previously, it will now be under this license. If you do not agree with the license provisions and don't want your work edited mercilessly please speak now so I can remove your text.
As of now, the new site is active and most of the walkthroughs are available, however I still need to do a bit of work. The main page doesn't even render properly in Chrome and facks up in IE (and Opera I am guessing). Half the links have not yet been activated on the main page and the url doesn't work as intended. The advantage of SPIP was that it allowed an article to be published in a variety of different languages. MediaWiki sort of supports this but I have not yet decided upon the best method to implement this. What this means is that for the moment the French and Dutch articles are not available. I apologise for any inconvenience.
I have also CamelCased the name to DinkSolutions to bring it into the 21st century and because MediaWiki sort of requires it.
If you want to become an active contributor to DinkSolutions, you can sign up right now and start editing. You may find the captcha annoying but it's better than viagra advertisements. If think my main page design sucks and you're interested in reverting vandalism and performing other menial tasks you're more than welcome to become an administrator if you're a trusted member of this forum and can demonstrate good spelling and grammar.
Sent from my iPad.
For a while now, I have been slowly migrating the site articles to a new site running upon MediaWiki. When I went through and looked at all the walkthroughs, many of them are incredibly poorly written, and some games have two walkthroughs for them repeating the same information! The thing about SPIP is that it is designed for online magazines/periodicals of some kind rather than a static collection of articles that aren't affected by chronology. Although Linus's Dink Wiki hasn't exactly become a bustling metropolis I decided upon MediaWiki as it supports a variety of functions that SPIP doesn't do very well such as the integration of images as well as external youtube videos through an extension. I do know that some have shied away from publishing their self-written walkthrough onto the site because of what they see as a difficult process of signing up and sharing their helpful hints.
Ultimately, I want to change it to be a community of inclusion that allows anyone to contribute by writing or editing pages on the site. As it is set up now, anyone is able to create a new article which includes all of those lurkers lurking this forum right now who don't want to sign up because they think everyone here is mentally ill.
However, the licensing requirements stipulate that all content that you submit will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. What this means is that if you have written a walkthrough previously, it will now be under this license. If you do not agree with the license provisions and don't want your work edited mercilessly please speak now so I can remove your text.As of now, the new site is active and most of the walkthroughs are available, however I still need to do a bit of work. The main page doesn't even render properly in Chrome and facks up in IE (and Opera I am guessing). Half the links have not yet been activated on the main page and the url doesn't work as intended. The advantage of SPIP was that it allowed an article to be published in a variety of different languages. MediaWiki sort of supports this but I have not yet decided upon the best method to implement this. What this means is that for the moment the French and Dutch articles are not available. I apologise for any inconvenience.
I have also CamelCased the name to DinkSolutions to bring it into the 21st century and because MediaWiki sort of requires it.
If you want to become an active contributor to DinkSolutions, you can sign up right now and start editing. You may find the captcha annoying but it's better than viagra advertisements. If think my main page design sucks and you're interested in reverting vandalism and performing other menial tasks you're more than welcome to become an administrator if you're a trusted member of this forum and can demonstrate good spelling and grammar.Sent from my iPad.
Unless it was necessary somehow, I do not see the point of the change. I really did like the old Dink Solutions for its easy-to-access walkthroughs and all that jazz. However, I assume once I get used to this new style, it will be quite good.
One thing that you probably want to look into, is the "title/bold texts". I don't know what it's called, really. For example, in the Stone of Balance walkthrough the first line, "Story 1 - The Singing Jewel", appears as very ugly and inside three brackets. You probably know of this already, and probably mentioned it without me noticing.
One thing that you probably want to look into, is the "title/bold texts". I don't know what it's called, really. For example, in the Stone of Balance walkthrough the first line, "Story 1 - The Singing Jewel", appears as very ugly and inside three brackets. You probably know of this already, and probably mentioned it without me noticing.
Honestly yeoldetoast, I like it .. alot. It brings the look of the site to a more modern look. Good job.
Remember: DinkSmallwoodPT's video playthrough playlists can count as Walkthrough alternatives. I'm pretty sure most of us doing the vids for it are completionists when playing a Dmod. 
