How+To+Participate

=How to Participate=

This site is an example of a "wiki." Invented by Ward Cunningham, wikis are a read/write web technology that allow for easy, fast, and collaborative websites to be built without the need for special software or a lot of training.

A good example of a wiki that many people are familiar with is [|Wikipedia]. Wikipedia is a great example of a wiki that allows anyone to edit any page that they want to. While it might seem that allowing many people the ability to work on, modify, or overwrite each others work would result in chaos, it typically results in the participants writing in a thoughtful, non-partisan fashion so that others will feel comfortable with the content.

SupportBlogging.com is hosted at the free (advertising-supported) Wikispaces service. Wikispaces make the editing of a wiki very easy to do. You don't actually need a user account to help build or edit the wiki, but if you get one first it helps to track the changes you make. Either way, you click on the "edit" button to edit the page. This may seem scary at first, but give it a try! Once you have finished your edits to a page, then just click "Preview" to make sure everything is OK, then click "Save." You now have contributed to a wiki!

On any page that has been changed by users, you can see those changes by clicking on the "history" link at the top of the page. You can also discuss the contents of a page without actually changing the page--those discussions are available by clicking on the "discussion" link at the top of the page as well.

If you want to be notified when anyone else changes the contents of a page, you can click on the "details" link at the top of the page and then "notify me." This lets you subscribe to a "feed" that will inform you of any changes to a particular page or to the SupportBlogging wiki as a whole. For more information on feeds, see the RSS section.