BlogOutdoors

WikiOutdoors Hits 100K...pageviews that is!

Woohoo...WikiOutdoors has cleared the 100,000 pageviews mark!What an exciting day. I attribute the growth in views to a couple of key things:

• Activity is increasing on the wiki, making the site more dynamic and interesting for search engines. WikiOutdoors now has 153 articles and is growing.
• Wikitravel graciously agreed to partner with WikiOutdoors, creating links back and forth between the sites.

As with many community-contributed sites, we are seeing a faster increase in pageviews than in contributions. In a forthcoming post, I'll be putting some ideas out there about how to increase participation on the wiki. I am learning a lot about participation in my role at JumpUp. Hopefully, between my full-time job, my baby and my hubby, I'll be able to focus more on participation going forward!

Until then, go on, get outside! Kira

Hike for Discovery

I just read about this organization on one of the Bay Area Hiking lists. A friend at Intuit did this in the Grand Canyon a while back and really loved it.

Here's the info:
Hike For Discovery is a fundraising program in which we train individuals for a destination hike event (in locations such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Kauai ) and in return they fundraise for blood cancer research, patient services, and education. The program generates more than 250 San Francisco Bay Area hike enthusiasts each year.

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Hike for Discovery - San Francisco, CA Chapter

Hike For Discovery (Fundraising Adventure Program for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society)

Whether you are a new or seasoned hiker, Hike For Discovery’s expert coaches will prepare you with months of training for a hike experience in destinations like the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and Kauai . In return, you will raise vital funds for blood cancer research and patient services.

For more information or to join the Bay Area Hike For Discovery team, visit www.hikefordiscovery.org/sf or call 800-78-TRAIN.

Megan Kilkenny
**Please note and save my new email address in your address book:
megan.kilkenny@ lls.org.
Changing Lives, One Mile at a Time

Easily add pictures to a wiki article

Wiki articles look best when photos are included. I love articles like "How to Buy a Private Island" on WikiHow, and "Tahoe Rim Trail" on WikiOutdoors because they are so inviting and engaging. If I could, I really would try to buy a private island, and, since I can, we will be hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail in the coming months (Sophie pending of course!).

Adding photos to a wiki is not always easy or intuitive. You have to know how to re-size your image to be appropriate for web purposes. Then, you have to know how to upload the file on the wiki. Last but not least, you have to know how to insert the internal link information into the wiki article itself.

We tried to make some of the steps easier on WikiOutdoors. Now, if a member uses one of our wiki templates, there's a nice little "add a photo" graphic at the top of the page. When a member clicks on it, she gets a pop-up box with instructions on how to upload the image file. Once that's done, the file is automatically included in the wiki article. We still have a size requirement, so the member has to re-size his picture in a photo editing program first. We think that's okay for now.

We also only included the "add a photo" module in one place on the wiki page. We think that, for now, we want to encourage the addition of at least one photo. For more advanced folks, they can add photos using advanced editing.

We're seeing a significant increase in the number of people using the "add a photo" module, which means that WikiOutdoors' articles are getting that much better.

WikiOutdoors Hits 10K

WikiOutdoors has hit 10,000 views of the main page! I'm so excited by this milestone, especially since visits are starting to grow at an increasing rate. Our page views overall have been growing at a double-digit rate since the relationship with Wikitravel blossomed.

It's nice to see some growth as it's been hard these last few weeks to keep up with a demanding full time job, a new baby and the wiki (not to mention, hubby, exercise, dog and sleep).

Yahoo!

WikiOutdoors Release Notes March 2007

We've made lots of updates to WikiOutdoors, the community-contributed resource on the outdoors, since way back in August when I started blogging about our templates.

A few of the highlights

• Wiki Templates: Two days before I gave birth to Sophie, we released our first template, making it easy to write hiking articles. About a month ago, we added a template for birding. Last week, we added templates for kayaking and program reviews. MEP built a new template engine so it's really easy for us to add new templates and customize them.
• Forums: In January 2007, we added threaded forums to WikiOutdoors. A very big tip of the hat to WikiHow since MEP based a lot of our forums work on the work that WikiHow already did. We're mostly using the forums to collaborate with our community on how to improve WikiOutdoors. I envision, one day, that the forums around each activity or each geographic location will become more robust. In a future post, I'll write about why we chose to add forums and how they differ from talk pages.

There are a bunch of items on our to-do list, the primary one being an update to the latest version of MediaWiki. Once that's complete, we're going to focus on implementing OpenID and a few other enhancements to the wiki.

It's been a long time folks

This will be a short post as I've got a longer one in the works with WikiOutdoors' latest release notes.

As you can see from the timespan, it's been a while since I blogged on BlogOutdoors. In a nutshell, I had a baby in September who, much though as I love her, was very high-need for the first few months of her life. It was hard enough to keep up with writing and editing articles let alone blog on BlogOutdoors. I managed to stay blogging on Butterfly Frenzy, mostly to keep me sane.

Then, I went back to work full-time in late January. Needless to say, I am starting back up with BlogOutdoors because we just have so many great things going on with our outdoors resource.

Check back soon for more!

Using templates to make wikis easy to use

After about six months of sweat equity and lots of feedback from our early, core users, MEP and I have finished up our first round of serious updates to WikiOutdoors. In the first three to four months, we mostly focused on getting WikiOutdoors up and running, writing the help files and building the early content.

Then, we opened WikiOutdoors up to a small group of outdoor enthusiasts, most of whom had no experience contributing to or editing wikis. This choice was very much by design. We believe that our community will only grow through the efforts of folks who are passionate about the outdoors but not necessarily familiar with the latest and greatest that web 2.0 has to offer.

So, it was no surprise to us, that what our core group of community members told us was...make WikiOutdoors easier to use! We discovered, by watching and talking with our early community members, that once they made their first edit or contribution, they were hooked. But, they were nervous about sharing WikiOutdoors with other friends because most of them (with the exception of my very tech savvy, 16-year old brother) found contributing "really hard."

MEP and I had always considered using templates, but we'd originally thought we'd wait to implement them. We realized that with most of the content contributed to WikiOutdoors, we could easily templatize the structure. MEP did the back-breaking code work to build the first template, and I really like how easy it is to use. The template even allows for a relatively painless photo upload, which means no more cryptic code to figure out how to place a photo in an article.

We're excited to announce that, as of today, we've got templates! We started first with a template to contribute Hiking articles, and we'll begin to introduce other templates shortly. We expect to add templates for gear reviews and program reviews next.

Making Progress

My biz partner, MEP, is making some serious technological traction on WikiOutdoors. When we first got the wiki going, our focus was on designing for "welcome and warmth," keeping it simple and clean, and frankly just getting the darn thing up!

Once up and running in beta, we shared WikiOutdoors with a small group of people who we knew were either outdoor enthusiasts, wiki fans or a combination of the two. We, of course, were excited to get contributions to the wiki, but our primary goal was user feedback. And, boy, did we get some, mostly related to making WikiOutdoors a lot easier to use.

MEP got straight to work on several key pieces of feedback, and some of the changes are already live. We've added hot links to wikis and meetups that we think will be valuable to our community. We've also cleaned up the licensing agreement, which would to have multiple options. Now, thanks to feedback from one of the founders of WikiHow, we've updated the licensing to Creative Commons Non-Commercial ShareAlike.

More changes are on their way, and I'm really excited about them. In particular, we're focusing heavily on making it easy to contribute your first article. MEP has put in a lot of hours of coding, and I'm really impressed with the first versions that I saw. Can't wait!

Sea-to-Sea Hiker on the PCT

At 8 months pregnant, I'm not nearly as active as I used to be. I must be feeling some psychic guilt about it, because I've thinking a lot about friends and family members who really kick butt outdoors.

One friend on my mind these days is Andy Skurka, a fellow Duke alum, who I met when we both worked on the Duke Start-Up Challenge. Two years ago, he started and completed the Sea-to-Sea Hike, which was a major accomplishment that saw him overcome hip dislocation, traffic and bears!

Andy's now about 45 days into hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. A goal of his that gave me a smile...the one about getting in shape and using the PCT to do so! I'm not sure how the newborn would feel about that.

Just doing it

A quick post to shout out a "yahoo!" to my husband, Jeff. We were staying a friend's ranch, celebrating with a crew of pals from undergrad days. Despite two nights of cooking great meals for friends and enjoying the fruits of the vine (so to speak), Jeff still woke up early and hit the water on the Cache Creek.

I was, of course, a little jealous. It's much harder these days to squeeze into a boat and a skirt at 31 weeks of pregnancy. But, I'm living vicariously and loved to hear the excitement in my hubbie's voice at the end of the ride.