AniAniWeb Help Guide

• About AniAniWeb
• Editing Rules
• Plug-ins

About AniAniWeb

An AniAniWeb (Ani for short) is a collaborative home page; while this home page clearly belongs to someone, there are areas that visitors can edit and contribute to. Aniani means "mirror" in Hawaiian Creole. If a regular static home page can be compared to a self portrait, an Ani is more akin to a reflection in a mirror. It is dynamic and there are often interesting things happening in the background which are independent of the individual looking in the mirror.

Consider yourself a guest in someone's virtual home. If you behave yourself badly, the owner might not be so keen to allow guests in the future.

AniAniWeb is implemented in Squeak, a Smalltalk with a liberal license. It was inspired by Ward Cunningham's WikiWikiWeb. AniAniWeb was created as a research project by Jochen "Je77" Rick of Mark Guzdial's Collaborative Software Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Editing Rules

AniAniWeb has its own simple editing rules. To link to a page, surround the page's title by '*'s (i.e. '*My Page*'); if the page does not already exist, a create button appears next to the new title; click on it to create the new page. The extensive list below documents all the editing features; these features are meant to enhance your use, but you do not need them to get started.

• Carriage returns are preserved.
• A line starting with '!'s becomes a header line. The more '!'s, the more important the header is. For example, '!!subject' will show up as '<h2>subject</h2>' in HTML. Up to three '!'s can be used.
• A line starting with '_' (an underscore) becomes a horizontal line. This is often used to separate topics.
• Using lines starting with '#'s and '-'s, creates a list.
  • A block of lines, where each line starts with '-' is transformed into a bulleted list, where each line is an entry.
  • A block of lines, where each line starts with '#' is transformed into an ordered list, where each line is an entry.
  • Lists can be nested. Thus, a line starting with '#-' is an element of a bulleted list that is part of an ordered list.
• To create a table, start off the lines with '|' and separate the elements with '|'s. Each new line represents a new row of the table.
• To create a preformatted section, begin each line with '='. A preformatted section uses equally spaced text so that spacing is preserved.
• To add an append (add to the page) area, begin a line with +. This will turn into a text area in the view mode, so users can add to the page without editing. This can be used to stop people from deleting a page's content; simply add the + line and lock the page; now, users are able to add, but not delete. Here are several options you can use with append areas (just add the character of each feature you want after the initial +):
  

  ^	Append area stays at the top and appends go down.
  _	(underscore) Appends are separated by horizontal lines. This can be useful for being able to tell the difference between different appends.
  +	Append areas are self replicating, so that an append also creates another append area. In this way, it is easy to respond to a specific append.
  @	Appends are marked with a timestamp. This can make it easier to identify the dynamics of certain discussions.
  -	(dash) Append areas do not show up on the page. Rather, there is just a button (add to the page here) that takes you to a separate page to add the comment. This is particularly useful in combination with self replicating appends (+ above), so that the amount of append areas does not dominate the page's content.

• To create a link, put it between '*'s.
  • If the page exists in the AniAniWeb (e.g. '*Existing Page's Name*'), a link to that page shows up on save.
  • In case the page does not already exist, the link shows up with a 'create' button next to it; click on it to create the new page.
  • If the link is external (e.g. '*http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki*'), a link to that external page shows up.
  • If the link is an image (URL ends in 'gif', 'jpeg', 'jpg', or 'png'), the image is inlined.
  • If the link is an email address (e.g. '*self@mail.me.com*'), a link to mail that person shows up.
  • You can add anchors to places in the text by adding a line starting with '@', such as '@My Section'. You can then create a link to that section using '*' and a '@'. So, '*My Valid Page@My Section*' will link to 'My Section' on the 'My Valid Page' page. If the section is inside the page you are linking from, you can omit the page name (e.g. '*@My Section*').
  • You can also alias all these links using '>'. So, you can create a link like this: '*My Alias>A Valid Page Name*'. The link will show up as 'My Alias', but link to 'My Valid Page Name'. For images, the alias text will become the alternate text for the image.
• Use any HTML you want. Here are some useful HTML tags:
  • To make something bold, surround it by '<b>' and '</b>'.
  • To make something italics, surround it by '<i>' and '</i>'.
  • To make something underlined, surround it by '<u>' and '</u>'.
• You may want to import HTML from another program. To do this, simply put the HTML between '<html>' and '</html>' and the formatting rules will not apply.
• You may want to share source code (C, Java, Smalltalk, etc.) on a AniAniWeb. To do this, simply put the source code between '<code>' and '</code>' and the formatting rules will not apply.
• You can also use plug-in tags, of the form <?tag ...?>, to include special features, such as calendars and graphs, in your page. To find out more about that, visit the plug-ins section.
• There are three characters (&, <, >) that have special meaning in HTML. Also, AniAniWeb adds two characters (*, @) to that list. In order to have these characters show up in plain text, you will have to alias them. This is the mapping for these characters:
  

  &	maps to	&
  <	maps to	&lt;
  >	maps to	&gt;
  *	maps to	&star;
  @	maps to	&at;

  These mapping can be used in page names too.

Plug-ins

Plug-in tags allow you to include special features in your AniAniWeb page. The tags and attributes are processed like HTML tags (attributes and tag names are case insensitive). The file and image tags allows you to reference uploaded files. The changes tag inlines the recent changes to the site. The calendar tag embeds a calendar with dates linking to pages. The blog tag embeds the calendar entries into a page. The graph and vote tags create graphs tabulating the votes of visitors. The rss tag embeds information from another site published through really simple syndication. The since and until tags embed a measurement of time. The siteMap tag embeds a site map, based on the page hierarchy. The text tag allows you to change the text displayed based on the access control of the user.