User talk:Blipadouzi

Welcome

Hello and welcome to the Adventures in Odyssey Wiki! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need help, check out our welcome page, ask me on my talk page (here), or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  blipadouzi 09:54, 6 May 2007 (PDT)

Preloaded Templates??

I was wondering if it would be possible to set up preloaded templates so that when you click on a red link, in addition to seeing the normal buttons like bold, italics, ect there could be buttons to preloaded templates to make article creation faster.

eg. say you click on "It's a Pokenberry Christmas, Part 2" from the welcome page to create that article. Then on the create article page there could be a couple of buttons like new episode, new character, ect. when you click on the new episode button it would automatically put in the text of the new episode template, like is shown here [1]

I know a couple of other wikis that use this and it makes creating pages a lot quicker and more uniform

hopefully this makes some sense (i've been studying 3-d vector calculus for most of the day so it might not)

thanks Reddo 22:09, 19 December 2007 (PST)

I'm not against the idea, but I'm not quite sure how...if you know feel free to go ahead and do it, I've been wanting that set-up for a while. As for the other wikis you know of that offer that...do they use the MediaWiki software to run their Wikis? That might be the major difference. Here's some information about preloads that I found on WikiMedia's Help pages. blipadouzi 22:15, 19 December 2007 (PST)

I looked at it and the other wikis that i know of that have that feature aren't run on mediawiki, but i think there should be some way that it can be done because if you add the &preload=Template:New_Episode to the end of the url when creating a new page it works just like it does on the other ones. However I also have no idea on how to add this feature. Reddo 22:29, 19 December 2007 (PST)

:S Neither do I...lol blipadouzi 04:05, 20 December 2007 (PST)

I had a bit of time to look into it today and as far as i can tell you need to download and install some extensions into the "MediaWiki /extensions subdirectory". I think it might be easier just to manually type in the &preload=Template:New_Episode at the end of the url. Reddo 20:06, 20 December 2007 (PST)

Couple of Questions

I have a couple of q's when you get time! ;) What do you think of including the music composer in the infobox for an episode? The AIOHQ has it up next to sound designer so it wouldn't be too hard to find. Also, how does one go about uploading a picture, and do I even have the clearance to do that? --Rachel Maxwell 14:01, 9 January 2008 (PST)

I think that adding the music composer would be a good idea it would take a bit of time but it wouldn't be to hard, i'll add it to the episode test page. As for uploading a picture you just click on the "upload file" link on the left hand side in the tool box, file in the three blanks, click upload file and your done. Reddo 15:32, 9 January 2008 (PST)

Imagination Station/Category

Redekop's doing these amazing changes, which makes this (justifiably) look rather minor, but I was wondering if you thought it would make more sense to make a separate category for things like Imagination Station adventures and KYDS radio broadcasts, or if we should just do a 'Shows w/ Imagination Station' or something from their page. Rachel Maxwell 19:00, 11 April 2008 (PDT)

I was thinking of working on the categories in more detail when the Wiki had more articles...like almost all the episodes at least. But if you want to go ahead and start working on it, by all means do. If you are wanting help on create categories or advise on where to place a new category in the Category Tree...then by all means, do not hesitate to ask. Thanks for all your help, and thank you everyone else too. Our little Wiki is really shaping up. blipadouzi 19:38, 11 April 2008 (PDT)

categorizing episodes by writter, director ect.

I had another idea as I was trying to fall asleep last night i thought of a another idea, using only some small modifications to the current info box, we could categorize the episodes by writer, director, ect, we could then further sort them in the categories by episode name or number, this would create a lot of categories at the bottom of the page but we could use the __HIDDENCAT__ function to get around that.

The only thing that we would have to change in the current episodes is to delink the writer, director ect, in the episode page and do it from the infobox instead. eg:

• infobox has {{{writer}}} and episode page has writer =[[writer name]]

we would just need to change this to

• infobox has [[{{{writer}}}]] and the episode page to writer =writer name

anyways let me know what you think, if we have one or two people working on it we could probably get the entire changeover done in an hour of soReddo 08:46, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

Since y'all are the technos, I'm gonna stay out of the discussion about whether or not to do it, but if you do decide to, I'll be glad to help. Rachel Maxwell 10:15, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

Mark, you never cease to amaze me. It's a blessing to have you help out around here. Look, obviously got a lot more technical, programming and parsing knowledge than I do. So I will relinquish the whole thing to you in those aspects...if you come-up with an idea, then just go ahead and implement it. I'll look after policy, project management and details. We'll consult with each other if we're not sure about something, but at this point I'd pretty much feel comfortable about giving you carte-blanche on those things. blipadouzi 15:55, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

Thanks, Rachel and I finished off editing all the episode pages to go with this new system, it should make us look a lot organized, I'm currently trying to think of an easy way to categorize the the episodes by character as well but i havn't come up with anything yet. Reddo 22:48, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

P.S. If you ever get a hold of Corey about the parser function thing, you should ask him to update us to a newer version of the mediawiki software, apparently our current version 1.10.1 is out of date and no-longer supported

I emailed Corey again yesterday explaining a little what we are hoping for and to contact you directly to get more information on what we need done. But remember he is very busy, and might not reply for a couple weeks. blipadouzi 04:07, 16 April 2008 (PDT)

Redirect

Um, I have nooo idea how to fix this *bangs head*. Sam redirects to Sam Johnson, but there are like three Sams. (Sam McKay, some anonymous kid, Sam Johnson, etc.) And Lost and Found has two pages. Rachel Maxwell 17:03, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

The best thing to do about the Sam thing is to create a disambiguation page like this one for Ed, as for the 2 pages for lost and found, I've tried deleting one of them and i can't get it to work, it's because of the way that mediawiki treats the & sign in url's, You have any Ideas Blipadouzi? Reddo 17:31, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

No, I've been trying for months to get rid of that. Corey's deleted the file itself from the server, if my memory serves me correctly...but it would take a lot of script editing to remove the file name from the code. blipadouzi 17:49, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

There, I created the Sam disambiguation page for you. :D blipadouzi 17:58, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

Thank you a ton! One more thing-would it be alright if I linked the albums and the episodes resources to the aiolibrary too? Rachel Maxwell 19:43, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

Not sure what the aiolibrary is, but by all means, the more references we have...the more credible the information that we have posted will be. blipadouzi 19:58, 15 April 2008 (PDT)

Link Passages

I know it's illegal to upload actual episodes, but we do link to oneplace listening, and 'Passages' is permanently available for listening on the Official Passages website. Would it be bad to link the Passages page to that?--Rachel Maxwell 15:39, 16 April 2008 (PDT)

No, of course not...we would not be posting the episodes on our pages, but rather simply posting a link to the existing episodes...by all means please do. blipadouzi 15:42, 16 April 2008 (PDT)

new way to display cast in episodes

I know this isn't the right place to post it but it seems like everybody reads your talk page to I'm going to put it here just to get some feedback on it. I created an infobox to display the characters on the episode pages, if implemented it would allow us to create categories for each character and have them automatically added to the proper category, just like the director writer, ect are. Currently it only works for 5 characters, but i want to get it to look good before i add the ability to have more or fewer.

here is what if currently looks like:

and what you need to type in would look like this:

• {{Infobox cast 5 characters
• | Character1 = Eugene Meltsner
• | Actor1 = Will Ryan
• | Character2 = Connie Kendall
• | Actor2 = Katie Leigh
• | Character3 = Tom Riley
• | Actor3 = Walker Edmiston
• | Character4 = Harlow Doyle
• | Actor4 = Will Ryan
• | Character5 = Jack Allen
• | Actor5 = Alan Young
• }}

Note: the squares are only there to separate the lines from eachother

Any suggestions on how to make it better? We're supposed to be having a couple day blizzard (yes, you read that right a blizzard in April) where I live so I'll have lots of time on my hands to change it any way Reddo 22:35, 17 April 2008 (PDT)

I think it's a great idea and it looks great, but one thing from the old way we listed them that I'd like to keep is the border. I feel it gave it a more professional look. Also, and this is just me being perfectionist...I'd prefer the list to be in alphabetical order according to character name. But otherwise, I think it's another stroke of genius. blipadouzi 04:06, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

K I put a border in, for putting the characters alphabetically i put it to a sortable table, you just have to click the arrows on top and you can sort it by actor or character. There currently is no way to have a default sort key so we'd have to put the characters and actors in the proper order ourselves. Anyother comments? Reddo 07:36, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

It looks great...fantastic job my friend. This is blipadouzi, BTW...I use this ID for various tasks. Jaguar 10:25, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

Thanks, I'm still playing around with it to see what looks best, I added a third version of it where the columns sort out by the last name of the character and not the first, I haven't done this for the actors yet, but it would be easy to add. I think it would more be a matter of policy of how to have the names sorted, so I'm leaving it up to you, the third one would require a few more lines of typing when creating an episode page but nothing to major. Reddo 10:49, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

um...I don't get it. We only do Whit, Jack, Connie, Eugene, and Harlow like that? Every other cast member is normal? --Rachel Maxwell 12:47, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

No we would do every character like that i just chose 5 characters from a random episode to show what it would look like Reddo 13:03, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

OK I think I get it. Lemme see if I've got this straight: At the top I put how many there are, and as I go down, put in 'character#' and 'actor#'? Sorry 4 being slow.--Rachel Maxwell 13:09, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

That's all there is to it, if we do end up going with the third version to have the table sort by last names it would require about twice that though as the first and last names for each character and actor would have to be entered seperatly, personally I'm not sure if it's worth the extra effort to have it sort by last name, but it's not up to me to decide Reddo 16:14, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

Hey dude, you teach-I learn. I just go along w/ u guys on this techno stuff-y'al are so good at it! If u get a chance sometime tho, could u change the preloaded new episode template so it'll be ready for the new infobox? --Rachel Maxwell 18:14, 18 April 2008 (PDT)

done Reddo 08:30, 19 April 2008 (PDT)

Shadowpaw

Who is Shadowpaw? Just Clue me in. Wikinewbie 18:58, 19 April 2008 (PDT)

Pardon me, but when we say 'Shadowpaw' we say 'May he work online forever' (as in Narnia when they mention the name of the Tisroc, 'may he live forever'. Kidding...--Rachel Maxwell 19:07, 19 April 2008 (PDT)

from what i understand shadowpaw is an IT person who has set up aiosoda, thetoo, and aiowiki, that's about all that I know about him. Reddo 08:32, 21 April 2008 (PDT)

Oops. *hides under bed* Don't kill me, Don't kill me...Wikinewbie 15:23, 21 April 2008 (PDT)

staff infobox

I've made a new infobox for FOTF staff, I've put it into the the page for Paul McCusker, I linked the numbers in it to the proper category, my idea for this was that we would no longer have to have manually make a list of what episodes everybody wrote, directed how many characters they played ect, but that was just my idea, I'm open to suggestions for it.

The amount that you have to type in for the info box isn't a whole lot:

• {{Infobox staff
• | chara_played = 6
• | ep_written = 54
• | ep_directed = 42
• | ep_sound= 0
• }}

Whenever it is that we get upgraded to the newer version of mediawiki, we'll be able to have these numbers actually update themselves and delink it from going to a category if the number is 0, to prevent hundreds of needless categories.

Anyway, let me know what you guy's think, I'm open to suggestions (it's still snowing here so I have some time) Reddo 08:48, 21 April 2008 (PDT)

I think... wait, what? could you re explain that end, and maybe uh, the middle? Oh yeah, and the beginning?Wikinewbie 15:25, 21 April 2008 (PDT)

to summarize it, If you look at the Paul McCusker page i added in the yellow box in the top right corner, i was just wondering if anyone thought that there was something that i should add to it. Reddo 15:45, 21 April 2008 (PDT)

I really like it! --Rachel Maxwell 19:52, 21 April 2008 (PDT)

Yeah, that DOES look very, uh, professional I guess. This is on its way to a mega-library of Odyssey information! Wikinewbie

Thanks, I had a brainwave the other day and I'm working on a newer version of it, the newer version will have more information in it for things like books and videos, it will also show how many episodes that each staff member has provided voices for, something that as far as I know no other website currently has. (ex. if Will Ryan voices only voices eugene in an episode it will only count as 1, if he voices harlow if will count as 1, if he voices both in the same episode if will be able to filter out the duplicates and that episode will still only count for 1). Also something that I'm adding is that if somebody hasn't done something (say will ryan writing an odyssey book) it won't even display the line "books written". Possibly the best part of the newer version is that all you have to do is put in {{Infobox staff}} and it does the rest by itself. Until this new version is finished the old version above will continue to work as described above. Reddo 05:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Linking

Do u think we should link characters throughout the plot on the episode pages? I've been doing it, but there's the character box at the end. What y'all think? --Rachel Maxwell 19:55, 22 April 2008 (UTC).

Wiki "etiquette" says that if a page is linked in an article, it should only ever be done once. In other words, if it's linked somewhere in the text, then it should not be linked anywhere else. Personally, I think that's bogus...feel free to link absolutely everything you see. blipadouzi 03:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. Another thing: Do I spell names as they're officially listed...or like they are on the soda fountain? It just gets complicated because we get alot of our info about the character appearances off the Fountain, but the official is official...Help?--Rachel Maxwell 04:21, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I started using the AIOSoda as a standard for character naming as it's a good system and it's established. But if we are wanting to modify it slightly or use a different system all together, that's fine. Talk it over amongst yourselves. I created a Episodes Guidelines page way back...maybe it's time to write some up for characters, actors and crew too for standardising purposes. Jaguar 17:10, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

I've been playing around with a few more ideas for the wiki about what to do with characters and for my current idea we need to have every character named something different like it is on aiosoda, to me it doesn't really matter what system we end up using just as long as we don't end up having multiple characters with the same name Reddo 03:23, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Books

Sorry again 2 keep bugging u, but r we gonna put the AIO books on here? Or are they already on here and I'm just not noticing... --Rachel Maxwell 16:54, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

Anything and everything AIO is welcome here...and no, they have no yet been added. Jaguar 17:11, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

When u or Redekop, or both, or, I don't care anybody at all...gets a chance, can u please look at what I've been doing w/ the books category? I've been working on it for a bit, and I can no longer think objectively about it. My brain hurts. (This is why I don't work on parser functions...) 4 reasons I don't understand, it makes Passages, Novels, etc. the main categories and books the subcategory. Please please help me --Rachel Maxwell 02:51, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Quotes

Anybody got a good idea for arranging the quotes? I tried putting lines between them |here but that really doesn't look that great. However it's the best I can come up w/ right now... any other ideas? --Rachel Maxwell 04:08, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

LCD

Should we put the Last Chance Detectives CDs on here? They're not strictly Odyssey, but Jason Whittaker was in one of them. --Rachel Maxwell 04:20, 1 May 2008 (UTC) On that note, what about the Kidsboro? --Rachel Maxwell 05:01, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure about LCD, but for the Kidsboro shows and books I think we should wait and see if they count them as official AIO episodes, if so then definitely include them, if not then the same as we end up doing for the LCD, but then again I'm not really then person to ask, I do more the behind the scenes stuff like templates.Reddo 05:15, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

We might could do some sort of 'spin-off' category, with subcategories for LCD and Kidsboro. Or something...--Rachel Maxwell 02:54, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Preloaded Templates

I figured out how to get the preloaded templates to appear when creating a new page. To use it go to a new page and a button should appear right above the editing box, click whatever type of page it is, (currently there is only episodes) and it will load the proper text. Any suggestions for more things to have besides episodes?Reddo 06:40, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

(P.S. I also figured out how to change/add things to the navigation box on the left hand side of the screen, let me know if there is anything you think that should be added)

Character pages

Once again this is more of a public announcement than a message directly to you

I made a new blank template for characters to add to the list of preloaded templates (describe in #15 Preloaded templates above) it can be seen here, I also added a character infobox to Whit's page. I took out the list of all the episodes that there character has been in however, using the new cast infobox i created (described in # 8 new way to display cast in episodes) we can create categories of episodes that the character has been in, with sub categories of who they were voiced by. To see this category you'd have to click on the number of episodes that they were in.

eg. for whit's page: you'd click on the number 395 in the infobox and see a category with all 395 episode that whit has been in, at the top would be the 4 sub-categories Episodes with John Whittaker voiced by Joseph Cammarato, Episodes with John Whittaker voiced by Jim Custer, ect. for all the different actors.

Just a reminder that all of the entries in these categories and sub-categories would generate themselves from the information that we put into the episode pages.

The only problem that I could see with this is to keep the number of episodes accurate, however in mediawiki 1.13 (currently in alpha testing) there is a new function to say how many pages are in a category, once we are upgraded to the newer version the changes could be made entirely characters infobox eliminating the need to go back and re-edit the pages.

I was also thinking about what else I can add the the characters infobox, like nickname, birhtday ect.

I'd like some input on this as it's a lot easier to change things now rather than later Reddo 02:47, 3 May 2008 (UTC) (I think my talk page posts are getting longer and longer)

I am in awe... I like the nickname and birthday idea-more of the characters have birthdays mentioned than I really realized. I really like what u did w/ the first and last episode thing! Is there any way we could deferentiate...differentiate...defferintiate. *goes to Word to spellcheck* deferentiate i was right...between minor and major characters, or between one time characters? (I promise I'm not attempting to sound important...this just rather excites me!) --Rachel Maxwell 14:15, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

We definitely can differentiate between characters, the only question is how should we differentiate them from each other? I was thinking we could put them into different categories, like 1 episode, 2-24, 25-99, 100+ or something like that, I'll think about it though and see what else I can think of Reddo 05:06, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Side bar

I added some things to the side bar, and removed some others to try and make the wiki a bit easier to navigate and find what you want quicker. any comments/suggestions for further changes? Reddo 20:36, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

It's looking awesome Mark, but how did you do it? Did Corey give you access to the source code? Jaguar 18:44, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

No I just created the page Mediawiki:Sidebar and changed a few things from the default Reddo 23:36, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

Town Hall

I created a new page called the Town Hall, this is meant to be a place to discuss any changes to the way the wiki looks or works, much like this talk page has been until now. My main reasoning for doing this was that this page is supposed to be for questions/comments directed at Blipadouzi, also Blipadouzi gets an e-mail each time this page is edited and after 178 page edits I think he may be getting tired of them, I took all the comments that I thought fell into this category and put them into the new page and it's archives. Reddo 03:37, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

HEY

Hey, I'm new to this webite and I have been having fun so far. I was wondering if there is anything that you would like me to do?

Novacom Saga and such

This may be just my opinion, but I think it might be a good idea to work a lot on the sagas, such as the Eugene saga, and the Novacom saga. Those are groups of episodes I could not pull myself away from. I think it will be good for other people to discover these epsodes also. Let me know what you think.

deleting pages with the and sign in the name

I figured out how to do it, all this time we were trying to access the page with this url: http://www.aiowiki.com/wiki/Album_45:_Lost_%26_Found and that just brought us to the page Album 45: Lost. However if you use this url: http://www.aiowiki.com/w/index.php?title=Album_45:_Lost_%26_Found it actually brings up the Album 45: Lost & Found page and allows for editing, something to keep in mind if this ever happens again. Reddo 06:08, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Hello

Hi, I was just wondering how to make the letters that you type on here colorful, or if that has not been added. L (talk)