Wikiphobic

Am I the only one to hate the user-interfaces that most wikis inflict? After half an exhausting hour that is like threading a needle with cooked spaghetti I press the submit button – to be greeted by “There has been an internal error”. I have wasted so much time trying to inflict my input upon wikis that I am tempted to give it all up. It is the flakey input facilities, limited letterbox windows with stuff disappearing off the edge, cursors jumping wildly about that I hate. In fact StrongED is the only piece of software that I like to use for inputting text. Why cannot wikis provide an email address for automated input? Or a nice box for dragging textfiles into?

In fact StrongED is the only piece of software that I like to use for inputting text. Why cannot wikis provide an email address for automated input? Or a nice box for dragging textfiles into?

It might be useful to create a StrongED mode to do the editing and then paste the result into the form in the wiki editor.
Or an export routine for Ovation Pro to wiki.
Or Fireworkz (I presume it has an export – not looked)

In many cases I use a word processor for generating the WIKI entries. That way I also have a grammar and spelling check.

What puzzles me more about WIKIs is the syntax. Some things are quite handy. Others not. Say you want to have a table. Then your’ up to a syntax that is more complex and painful than plain HTML.

It might be useful to create a StrongED mode to do the editing and then paste the result into the form in the wiki editor.

Having struggled with wikis and fora in similar fashion to Gavin, I’m now always using StrongED for editing such things. Doing it this way has a couple of advantages; use of a familiar editor (you can even create a special mode like Steve suggests), and if there’s a failure you still have your work in StrongED.

Getting the text into StrongED is easy enough once you’ve got used to NetSurf’s idiosyncrasies:

After selecting, drag the selection to StrongED but after clicking on the selection wait briefly before moving the pointer or it may start a new text selection.

When you want to select all text (Ctrl-A) in a textarea make sure the caret is inside the actual text otherwise it selects the entire page.

Once finished editing, save the text straight to the target area (clear it first if required). I find it much less frustrating this way.