Up The Crick without a paddle
Some of you know that I have a website called The Crick. It is a wiki that is available for anyone to add ministry stuff to: sermon notes, lessons, sketches, bible studies, whatever. In practice it is just my stuff. Or, it was. A couple weeks ago it disappeared. Now it is just a blank page.
The site runs on MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. My very helpful webhosts have informed me the reasons it is not working are:
- a parse error
- a syntax error
- an unexpected T_STRING
and worst of all
- a fatal error!
You may be interested to know that these errors happen on the lines numbered 160 and 32.
I’m beginning to think that my biggest error was choosing such heavyweight wiki software for my little project. I’m thinking of switching to DokuWiki, and I would appreciate some advice, especially from people who know about wikis, PHPs and MySQLs (or perhaps TheirSQLs). Is anyone like that out there?
19 February 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: the crick

Look! Another video
This video will make no sense out of the context of the script, but watch it anyway. It’s only a minute long.
If you click on the link for the script you will notice that it takes you to a wiki site called The Crick. The Crick is the site where I post all my notes for my lessons and messages and sketches.
Why would I want to do that? Several reasons.
- It is a good place to store them.
- I can get to them no matter what computer I happen to be using.
- They are easy to share with people (e.g. actors in the sketches or you).
- Anyone can edit and improve them.
There are many, many wonderful people giving away ministry material on a billion websites all across the internet. Some look like they’ve not been touched since 1998. Others are branded up to the eyeballs so you who’s giving you all that goodness.
The thing is, for incredibly picky people like me nothing, whether free or purchased, is quite right. I always end up changing it to make it fit what I am doing. So I thought, what if lots of people could give away their stuff – and really give it away, unbranded, with no usage restrictions and open to improvement? That would be cool. And useful. In time, once enough material was on there, a creative youth or children’s minister could go to The Crick and put together their own curriculum. For free.
That’s my crazy idea. If you or someone you know might be interested, let me know in the comments or at jeff at gmail dot com. Meanwhile, if you are looking for a sketch, there are six here.
2 December 2007 Jeff Gill
tags: drama,
the crick,
video


