I'm happy to announce that a wiki dedicated to all things vintage amp and metroamp related is now online:

http://metroamp.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page


I have started to populate it myself and have created some categories to help archive info so it's easy to find. This is a work that is very early in it's progress. I'll be adding pages as often as possible, daily at first.

Like all wikis, this one can run on the contributions and interaction of it's users. I hope that it will. Due to the integration of the wiki into our forum, you can log in with your existing member details. But I have to add you to a specific permissions group before you can edit wiki pages.
If you are interested in this permission, please PM me with your request.

I hope this wiki will be a more logical, organized way to archive the data that often gets buried here in the forum. And possibly to be a central archive online for all technical info relating to vintage amps.

Please take a look, the categories and pages styles should outline my idea of how we can use this resource. Of course, this is just my impression. A true wiki is a living, breathing entity that develops dynamically over time.

Enjoy!

george

BTW we will add a link to the wiki in the forum header soon.

VG

Great idea, a useful addition to the search function which, like most forum search functions can be a bit fussy if you are vague with your search terms (hence the FAQs that crop up cyclically on the forums.............yes I know I ask them too )

Thanks Neil!


I have created over 100 pages so far. I hope everyone is finding it useful, even with the limited resources I've uploaded.

Anyone interested in contributing, please let me know. Any vintage amp info is welcomed.

Thanks,

george

Hey George, can you be more specific as to how we can contribute? do we all have access to update? do we need to email you? is there a picture size limit? can we add new topics? I think there are alot of people here that could add some great content, we just need to what we need to do? maybe add a link for instructions on updating? This is a great idea!

It took me a while to get my head around the whole wiki thing and I'm still getting it. I'll see if I can find a good link for "how to".

Everyone is welcome to contribute. Anything relevant to vintage amps is welcomed.

Got a mod for tweed Fenders? Great, post it.

Got a schematic for an Echoplex? perfect.

Wah pedal mods? Sure.

Maybe I should say "anything relevant to guitar tone". Web space and bandwidth is cheap, so as long as it stays organized we can add any info that a tech might need.

To contribute: all I have to do is add you to the wiki group. Email or PM and I'll do this. Log in to the wiki with your forum name and password. And you're good to go.

george

You will need to pm either George or me to request wiki editing privileges.

If you are approved, your forum login/pass will work for the wiki.

There is a file size limit for uploads.

You can edit the MetroAmp wiki the same way you would Wikipedia or any other wiki, there is an included help section on the site that points to these links.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... dit_a_page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing

Interesting idea. I might have something to contribute here.

- WOT

I'm still trying to get my head wrapped around editing the wiki. George, I replaced the previous BBRI board gif with the larger version. It shows up fine but I still need to figure out how to edit the preview versions and the page itself. I'm guessing the wiki sizes images automatically but it's doing some funky things to it. More than likely because it's a GIF....JPG would resize better. Anyway, I'll probably re-save everything out to JPG later and see if that's any better. I'll also upload a better quality PDF straight from Illustrator. I'm guessing editing the page itself, there may be a line of code allowing you to set the preview image sizes....going to try to set up with Dreamweaver later.

Me too man. There is a curve involved. The code is different. I made a notepad doc with lots of codes that I copy and paste into pages. Check out the editing tips link at the bottom of the pages too.

You can click on existing pages to see the code too.

JPG's do seem to scale better. Gif's just turn into pixelated crap. PDF's look great, but you can't embed them into the page, they have to be a link.

WOT, feel free to put up any info. Anything related to vintage amps and gear applies.

George

Wow! What a sick adventure that was. I managed to upload better-quality PDF and JPG versions of the board. You weren't kidding about the curve...feels so clunky to use. I accidentally created a new page for the PDF when messing with some of the code but for the life of me couldn't find any way to delete files or pages. I went back and re-coded the link the way you had it. Really not a very intuitive app. I just feel like I'm missing something as far as how to name files and lay things out in the most user-friendly way.

In a weird way it reminds me of the one time I tried playing guitar hero at an arcade...I couldn't get halfway through one song because I knew how to play it in real life so i kept thinking of the actual guitar parts. Same for this, I'm so used to my straight-up day to day html coding and the control it gives you that I feel at a loss using the wiki's tagging/organizing.

The amp wiki, like wikipedia or any other wiki based on mediawiki software, does not allow you to input html, for various reasons. It uses wiki markup, for security and also because it is designed to be edited by everyone. The links above should give anyone the basics on how to use wiki markup. If you are just adding text, there is not really anything to learn. The basic styling takes a bit of time investment to understand, but a wiki is not really about style, it's about content. You can't delete pages once you create them, but you may be able to move or rename them.

I hope no one is put off by the learning curve of the wiki markup, we want everyone to get involved and contribute, and we can work together to help users and answer questions about how to edit and add to pages.

Basic content and text-styling as you said isn't an issue and is pretty straight forward. I just found it bizarre that I couldn't go in and delete a page created by mistake or delete files that aren't being used. It seems to operate on an "out of site, out of mind" principle but still those files and pages still take up space somewhere (albeit not too much in this case). I'm just used to keeping everything as streamlined as possible.

That's the way that mediawiki software is designed - it has its own rules and quirks since it is designed to be publicly edited by a diverse group of people. It's not html, it's not a forum, it's a Wiki These same quirks exist on any website that uses mediawiki as the engine, including widely-known sites like Wikipedia. What if one person decided it would be a good idea to delete all the pages and images?

If you have suggestions about streamlining things I would encourage you to contact the developers, perhaps they may incorporate your ideas into future releases... http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

That's what "roles" are for. If the wiki took advantage of this, the admin could set up roles and exactly how much control an individual has in the editing process. On the downside, if an editor could only upload content, not delete and the admin could do anything, the admin might get more email than he cared asking, "Can you delete this? Can you remove that?"...at least in the early stages while folks are figuring things out.

Anyway, I understand what you're saying. The same can be said for any CMS-based app as well (drupal, joomla, textpattern, wordpress, expression engine, etc.) where you have to learn its quirks, proprietary ways of coding/theming, etc. etc. It's a necessary evil if you need to use the app. Hopefully we can use this thread as a springboard to problem-solving as more folks start editing.

On that note, I still need to see if there's a way to separate a file's name from the actual link that shows up when you upload it. (e.g., you have a file named "1969_board_layout.pdf" but you want the link to be something different like "Metroamp 1969 PTP board.") I believe it automatically creates a link using the file name but I need to read the editing help files a bit more.