User:Spider
From Toadwater Guide
Contents |
Disclaimer
None of this information is guaranteed to be true or completely up to date. Whilst the content of this page might well be informative and interesting to you, the main reason I have created this user profile is to demonstrate to would-be guide writers how to use the wiki format properly. As such, there are some oddities in the page (like using a numbered list for no apparent reason), which are there purely to demonstrate how to do such things in wiki.
Using Wiki is extremely easy, and with a few minutes of familiarisation I believe anyone is capable of creating a well formatted and useful article, complete with proper headings, and properly formatted links etc.
About
For the first two years of my life I lived in the far south of England, having been born in Exeter. Of course I don't remember this, being only 2 years old when my family moved up to Nottingham where I spent the next 16 years.
Now I am living in Leicester, and studying mathematics at Leicester University. I am in my fourth and final year and will be graduating in July 2008. I am an active member of my Christian Union, as well as being very involved in my Church. I also live in a house with 3 other Christian lads, we have a great time together and life is generally very good.
My hobbies include:
- Listening to and playing music
- Playing various sports, especially Squash
- Watching TV series' and movies
- Playing computer games (including toadwater, duh!)
- Coding
- math!
Coding
I have been coding for about 8 years now. I started out by playing around with Basic on the old Acorns at my school, and since then I have learnt a great deal. I specialise in database driven websites and applications using PHP and MySQL, but also have a great deal of experience with mIRC scripting and have recently been learning Java, and have been experimenting with JavaScript.
Among other things I have written a number of scripts for mIRC including a Trivia bot and Bible recollection bot, and I have developed a number of web based applications including a News database, a simple Calendar system and an archive database of my music.
I am also in the process of creating a new online version of Toadstat (it will have a new name too), intended to be much simpler to use and somewhat more extensive. The project is in it's infancy however and a lot of planning still needs to be done for it.
TV
I confess that I'm something of a geek, especially when it comes to the TV I like to watch. To give you a vague idea of what I like, here is a list of things which I have watched recently, as well as a few which are in my to-watch list:
- Star Trek DS9
- Star Trek Voyager
- Babylon 5
- Andromeda
- House
- CSI
- Doctor Who
- Top Gear
- Star Trek TNG
- Star Trek TOS
- Star Trek Enterprise
ToadWiki
I am a ToadWiki admin, and my goal is to make the wiki an easy to use tool for finding information, especially for new players. In order to do this, much of the information in the wiki needs to be reorganised in such a way that it is much easier to find.
There are two major tools which I am trying to use across the whole of the wiki to make it a much more helpful source of information, these are categories, and centralised articles. Categories are essentially a way of grouping related articles together, so that if you are reading one article, you can immediately see a list of other articles which are closely related. So far a number of the main skills have been converted into categories, you can see an example of a category in Farming, or Trees. The important thing about categories is that if you are on a page which has been put into a category, for example Compost worm, you can see at the bottom of the article which category it belongs to, and through that quickly find related material.
The other important tool for the wiki, which I have not had time to employ so much, is centralising articles. Put simply, this means less not more! So instead of having 10 different articles each describing a single quest item, and each being about two lines long, it is much better to have an article called "Quest Items" which details each of the items in turn. Having less pages has a number of advantages; it becomes much easier to create an index of articles, and since the index will be shorter it will automatically be easier to use. Having less pages means you have to go through less clicks to find what you want, so locating information becomes easier. Most importantly though, short articles are unhelpful because they contain little information and a lot of effort is required to keep so many articles up to date, whereas if the information is contained in a smaller number of longer articles, the job of maintenance becomes easier and the information becomes more extensive and useful.
So my main aims for the future of the wiki are:
- Categorise everything
- Centralise relevant articles
- Make the main page clear and easy to access information from
Hopefully once these tasks have been achieved the ToadWiki will be sufficiently useful that players will be able to answer all of their questions easily and quickly, even if they aren't sure precisely what they are looking for!
Projects
Spider Appreciation Day
It seems that a new toadwater holiday has been created on March the 2nd, entitled Spider Appreciation Day. I'm rather honoured by this.
