A central landing page

There is now a brand new central landing page:

Chainki

Before, if anybody surfed to the general chainki.org address, they were redirected automatically to the English main page.

Of course, it is still possible to bookmark either of the language specific home pages:
http://en.chainki.org for English
http://fr.chainki.org for French

Chainki reaches 50,000 pages

Today Chainki passed 50,000 pages. Not bad I feel, since it only really started a few weeks ago. Still, not to be complacent, there are 686,740 pages waiting to be generated...

As mentioned in "The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky"

Well, well, well. A mention in the hallowed Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky. OK, I admit, I have never heard of it. And I have to admit that I barely know where Kentucky is let alone Louisville.

Nonetheless, this, I will claim as Chainki's first reference in the news world!

It's not exactly the biggest in-depth review or exposé which I have ever seen about a website. But I'm pretty impressed that one way or another word is getting out. How, I wonder, did some guy on a journal in Louisville, Kentucky hear about Chainki?

What with Chainki actually appearing to take off, this is starting to get a little scary...

As my mum said today - you'll soon be on Richard & Judy. After my head stops swelling, I do at least think that if this continues at this rate, some geeks at a geek conference may actually in future have heard of me. Now that really is scary...

No. 38 in the "List of largest MediaWiki wikis"

I've submitted Chainki to be listed in the List of Largest MediaWiki wikis (MediaWiki you will remember is the software which runs not only Chainki but also Wikipedia, amongst others).

It's come straight in at number 38 (at least when I wrote this post). Another place to watch progress.

And of course, size does matter.

They've gone bloggin mad

Now the UKeiG, the UK eInformation Group, a professional body for users and developers of electronic information resources have blogged me.

Thanks!

Chainki appearing in a blog near you

Recognition!

It's always nice as a webmaster to know that somebody out there is actually looking at your website with interest. Phil Bradley has even written a little piece on his blog about Chainki.

Thanks a lot Phil!

First appearance in www.alexa.com

Alexa is a site which tracks how important a website is compared to all other websites on the internet. The idea is that the nearer you are to number 1 you are the better. Up until now Chainki didn't even appear on the radar - not surprising since it only started this month.

However, today when I checked, ah joy...Chainki appears. The figures will perhaps have changed when you look, but this is where I was looking: Alexa data for Chainki. When I looked, and bearing in mind that this is the first time Chainki has ever even been noticed on the radar, Chainki had:

• a 3-month average place of 2,323,377 and
  
• a 1-week average of 406,925.
  

It's not exactly straight in at number one, but it's a baseline from which to judge any improvement.

I'm delighted - at least it's starting to appear, because it is a reasonably objective view of the "success" (or not) of a website.

"Bonjour" to all our French friends

Chainki is now available in two flavours.

French
and
Original

Or should I say:

Chainki est maintenant disponible en deux langues, le français, et l'original.

Chainki gets a new coat

Chainki now has a new coat.

It used to be dressed in white, identical to Wikipedia, but now it sports a rather fetching (in my opinion), battleship blue.

Go on, tell me what you think.

First vandal :-(

This blog is all about firsts at the moment. Today we had our first vandal. See if you can spot what they did. The clue is in the comment they gave to their edit: "important link"

Here is the main page before they appeared.

Here is the main page after their vandalism.

Or maybe they just thought the link really was that important?

First visitor via a search engine

Another first! This time, the first visitor to the site via a search engine.

They came via this Yahoo search. It's a bizarre looking search that the person entered, but (at least when I check - your milage may vary, since search engine results are a moving beast), Chainki is right up there in 3rd place. 3rd place! Not bad.

It's a little silly that the search engine jumps to the edit version of the page rather than the article itself. Probably confused the poor punter no end. But from the logs, I can see he or she stayed around on the site quite a while.

Just need to get another few thousand people coming each day...

The first new site!

One of the things I've been doing is trying to get other websites to link to Chainki. An example of this is my request on battlestarwiki talk page

Anyway, it worked. They added a link to Chainki on that site, and they also added the first new site to Chainki Battlestar Galactica site added.

Ah, another small step in the right direction...

Minor spat with a dmoz editor

I mentioned on the dmoz editor forums in this thread that Chainki existed as a merge of wiki and dmoz data. Very quickly I had this rather terse message slapped on the front page of the wiki:

This site is in violation of the Open Directory License [1] - although it links to the Open Directory Project - since it fails to have the correct links to categories on each page.

They're dead touchy about people not giving the attribution to their site correctly. And with good reason; they grant people the right to use the content in any way they wish and all they ask is that sites put an attribution at the bottom of each page. Fair enough.

And in fact I had put the attribution but a small error in putting the code in production meant that the attribution looked right at a glance, but an eagle-eyed dmoz editor spotted in an instance that it wasn't quite right.

From the full story, Violation of the ODP licence?, you can see that it took me about 6 minutes to fix it. Not bad responsiveness eh?

And at least someone visited the site and bothered to comment. As a webmaster there's nothing worse than having your site ignored.

Sombody made an edit!

Another amazing event: somebody has actually made an edit on Chainki!

For me, this is very exciting. Why? Because it shows the wiki working.

Take a look at their edit

It's interesting because it seems they were looking for travel and wanted a list of cities, so added the subcategory "Cities". Of course, the information is there, but under the regional pages, for example for London . Nonetheless, why not have some references via a "Cities" page? Good idea sir!

Anyway, this person made an edit, but they also made my day.

A visitor! A visitor!

I had the first visitor! Yes, someone, goodness knows how (maybe something to do with the fact I was shamelessly promoting the site wherever I could), visited Chainki!!

I just happened to be looking at the online stats which show who/when/what people look at, when I saw that someone (not me!) had been on the site. They looked at Help (not written yet, oops), looked at a few pages about beekeeping, at a couple of menu items which didn't exist (oops), and went their merry way.

I have duly added some Help, and since the person was looking for beekeeping, the help is done in their honour about aforesaid bumblies.

A site is born!

I have been working on the www.chainki.org website for many months now. In a way, I have been working in this domain for many years now with a similar site which was struggling without the power of the wiki software I now use.

Anyway, on Friday 7th July 2006, at 17:26 (it's in the "Recent Changes" log, so I can see exactly), I cleared out all the test pages, and created the main page for the site.

Chainki was born!

Intro

Seen the website www.chainki.org yet? Well, I'm the guy who created it. My name is Hugh. This blog is to record some of the background behind the site in a bloggie sort of way. I don't know what the future will hold, nor this blog for that matter, but welcome aboard!