I finally hit upon the idea of what to put on the wiki — tips, techniques, and information about astronomy and astrophotography. The first update is how to connect my ST-10 and TCF-S to the NP-101.

When I went to the wiki, however, I found that someone had trashed it. There was one nice note about the site on the registration page, but many of the other pages had a bunch of junk about prescription medicines (IIRC). I deleted the entire wiki, given that with little or no content it was easier than cleaning it up.

This did lead to some fun. I installed the other wiki software available from my hosting company, TikiWiki, and navigated the set-up options. It has full security and allows you to require registration. It took a bit of poking around but I got it to work. It is now the reigning wiki, although the wiki is still in place, with most pages locked down.

Well, instead of writing a bunch of posts, I have updated the look and feel of the blog. I used the Connections theme from the WordPress web site. I hope this makes it more pleasing to read. It doesn’t handle pictures well, but that’s not what the blog is for, that’s what the gallery is for.

The IBM internal guidance for posting on wikis was actually quite good. The piece of advice that stuck with me as good style was never to post a link by writing “look form more information here: http://www.obsballona.org/”

One should always merely include the link as part of the discourse. Sometimes you need to think about how to compose it, but it is better that way.

Existential post. Consider that a warning.

I suppose the first premise of this blog is that no one, except me, will be reading it. That makes it kind of like a diary. Aaron Price of Slacker Astronomy described blogs as “primarly having one topic.” I have trouble with that definition as I have trouble writing any regular postings on a consistent topic.

Powerline does politics. LGF does the Middle East. But if I rant (or whatever) I just want to rant. Or post valuable links. Or Astronomy tips. Or whatever.

So that is what I will do.