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DatePage
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesA date page is a page whose name references a particular day. On wikis, date pages usually use the date as their name, eg. "2003-06-15".
Creating date pages has to be easy, because you will be adding a new one nearly every day, and reading them should be easy, too. Manually adding a link to a date page on a front page, clicking on the link, and editing the empty date page makes this hard. Moreover the name of a date page is supposed to follow a naming convention, like yyyy-mm-dd, creating a date page manually requires that the user is aware of the convention and that he did not make any errors when he creates the page. This raises the need for a form of EasySubmission to create date pages.
One form of EasySubmission is to have links to all relevant date pages in the goto-bar (a prominent place users go to for navigation aids).
Examples:
- "today" and "yesterday" pages for authors that maintain an OnlineDiary with daily entries.
- A link to a date page for the exact date and time of the page view for authors that maintain busy weblogs and post several times a day.
- A calendar widget that links to all days of the current month, for authors that expect visitors to want to read lots of old posts, eg. comic strips. See WikiCalendar for more.
Another form of easy submission might be to have on the front page a simple form like:
D:[17] M:[June] Y:[2003] [Edit]
The first three elements being drop down lists, the last one a submit button. Upon submission of this form the wiki will direct you to the editing of the corresponding DatePage eg 2003-06-17. The creation of the page name might be handle either by some client-side scripts or by the wiki engine (something like action=edit&day=17&month=6&year=2003).
An alternative description appears redundantly on ArchivingNews (and begs reworking into this page somehow that is beyond me at the moment).
Adding some context to a date page name
One drawback of date page is that the page name gives no information besides the date as to its content. In the context of a WikiAsPim this might not be a problem, but bloggers sometimes like to add a title to their posts. This can be overcome by adding, for instance, a suffix to the date page like, "2003-06-15, the beginning".
A drawback to this is that a visitor can not access a date page directly using ?2003-06-15, but the wiki engine might integrate some url treatments to direct the visitor to the corresponding page or to a list of corresponding pages.
Suggestion for date pages:
Add a tag into the page that is never displayed in the rendered results: Something like $PAGEDATE$=2006,12,30 (Using YYYY,MM,DD to be universal).
This can then be used during specific date searches, or the "Save" mechanism of the Wiki can extract the date at submission time and add it to a date field in the page record on the server database which can then be indexed and used for other purposes.
Si. Dunford