I setup a wiki at wiki.gburg.net. I’m working with someone that is more involved with the Battle of Gettysburg community in the hopes of getting a decent user base together for the website. I should also probably contact some professors in the area (specifically at Gettysburg College) to see if they might be interested in using it as part of their course work. I know from experience that the only way a website like this will work is if there is a real community around it to sustain it.

As part of setting it up, I wrote a PHP script to create individual pages based on a spreadsheet that I have of the monuments on the Battlefield. Mediawiki doesn’t have the ability to import generic pages, so I wrote the script to take data from the spreadsheet (in comma separated value form) and create the XML document style that Mediawiki expects to import. It took a couple of attempts to get it right, but in the end, I was able to import the document and all of the pages were created.

I also installed the Google Maps extension for Mediawiki, which allows you to put a map on wiki pages. The spreadsheet that I have of the monuments includes GPS coordinates for about 150 monuments. For those monuments I included the code for the Google Maps extension, and their pages now display a map with a marker showing their location!

time: 2.5h

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 10:57 am and is filed under Other Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.