As you all know I have been working with Deki Wiki and having a blast.  I am learning how Deki Wiki works and how to skin it.  I have been working on a few skins just for fun and they are getting closer to being done.  When I get them completed I will be offering them as a download for free to the MindTouch community.

If you want to see the three skins I am working on and the one I do in the future, feel free to surf over to deki.cornerpixel.net.  You will see in the navigation, links to all the skins I am working on.

Below are the screenshots of the skins I am almost finished with.  I have one for Spring, Fall and Winter.  I will eventually get one done for summer, and then work on more corporate looking skins.  For now here ya go.

If anyone likes them, just submit a comment.  That way I can show the comments to my wife and she might forgive me for spending all my time skinning Deki Wiki.  I guess I should spend a little time with my family.  They are pretty cool.

Oh well, I hope you enjoy the skins,

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)

As I am sure many of you know, twitter can be a very addicting thing and can make you do dumb things. A couple weeks ago I was gently pushed into becoming a twitteree by my supervisor and by the end of the same day I was up and running on TweetDeck.

Long story short, I saw a tweet by Aaron Roe Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch Inc. In his tweet Aaron had a link to his blog in which he displayed a fine picture of himself in a suit that is remarkable similar to the one Oliver Young was wearing in an avatar picture.

For those who don’t know Oliver Young is the Forester researcher for Web 2.0. 

Okay, not to be outdone, or just because I love Photoshop suits and ties, I decided to post my picture in the same suit.  What do ya know, I don’t look too bad in that suit either.  I took my photo by the flag for that Presidential look.

Below are the three of us for your viewing pleasure in the following order; Oliver Young, Aaron Roe Fulkerson, and Michael Silva.

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)

About two weeks ago I was asked to dig into Deki Wiki so that I could help my customer build an intranet site from Deki Wiki.  There had been a lot of research done on what CMS/Wiki to use for this companies intranet site, and it finally came down to Deki Wiki. 

At first I was a little worried about Deki Wiki.  I hadn’t heard much on skinning the application.  I am a type of person who likes to skin CMS’s and hate to be boxed into a solution that I can’t make prettier.  After I got a chance to look around I was impressed with the way Deki Wiki was built.  It was created in a way that allows a lot of customization and skinning options.

After messing for a little while I found out that you can do all sorts of modification and it’s even pretty easy to create your own skin from scratch to include the markup and php code for the layout.  I decided however that for this intranet site that I would stick to just tweaking and changing a skin that comes with Deki Wiki.  I decided this for the simple fact that I wanted the site to be safe even through future Deki Wiki updates.  I figure it will be less work this way and less pain for the customer.

I ended up choosing the fiesta skin to play with, and I had a lot of fun changing things around.  There were a couple things that were frustrating through the process, but that could be because I started by changing the PRO skin instead of the wireframe.  Below are two screenshots of the skins I have done so far.  I plan on doing many more.

The next step will be trying to figure out a way to install or have multiple Deki Wiki sites on one server so I can display different skins rather than just the fiesta skins I create.

You can see these two skins and some skinning guides soon to come at deki.cornerpixel.net.

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)

I was working on some Deki Wiki Skins yesterday and came across the use of Variable in CSS.  I have been working with CSS for a while now and haven't used variables, and had never seen them before.  I feel pretty dumb for not knowing about that, but now I do, and I like them a bunch.

This is what I came across in Deki Wiki's CSS sheet.

.header .siteNav .userAuth a.userPage:hover {
    color: var(linkcolor_hover);
}

#siteNavTree a {
    color: var(sitenav_color);
}

There were some more, but that was just a couple.  Okay I Google' d CSS variables and I found a good article from the guys at disruptive-innovations.  Below is the meat of the article with a link to the full article below the information.

Using the value of a variable as the value or one of the values of a property in a CSS declaration should be achieved using the new functional notation var(). This function takes only one argument being the identifier being the name of the variable. The declaration becomes invalid if the variable does not exist.

Examples:

@variables
{ 
CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12;
}

div.logoContainer
{ 
background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor);
}

More Examples:

@variables
{ 
myMargin1: 2em;
}
@variables print
{
myMargin1: 10px;
}

.data, div.entry
{ 
margin-left: 30px; 
margin-left: var(myMargin1);
}

In the example just above, the left margin of an element carrying the class 'data' will be 2em for instance for the 'screen' medium type, and 10px for the 'print' medium type in a user agent conformant to CSS Variables. A legacy non-conformant browser would apply a 30px left margin to such elements in all media types.

I highly recommend reading the full article.  It is very good.

~MikePixel (Michael Silva)