One of the many reasons I decided to sink some money into getting my own site was to try out some of the pieces of web software I have run across in my 'net travels. I have tried out WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Xoom, GeekLog, Small Machines Forum, phpBB, PHPwiki, sNews, Vanilla Forum, dotProject, RoundCube Webmail, and a few others I can't recall at the moment. As of now, all I have left is two WordPress installs (blog and front page CMS), Vanilla Forum, a non-working install of Movable Type, sNews, and MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia and all of the other Wikimedia sites.

The primary reason for trying all of this stuff was that I wanted to see how it worked, if I could use it for anything, and if I could do any cool or interesting customizations. I wanted this experience for personal and possible future professional purposes. Most of the software was useless for my personal purposes. The programs I kept were programs I either really liked or had some use for. One of the programs I had no real use for but kept anyway is MediaWiki. The wiki format turned out to be an ill match with me in regards to content management, but I kept it around due in part to the difficulty I had in setting it up and in part to my belief that the Web Gods might stop thwarting my attempts to implement the .htaccess Apache RewriteRules for shorter URLs. They laugh and mock and cause frustrating redirect errors that shut the whole program down.

I decided that I should come up with a better reason for MediaWiki's usage of disk space and MySQL database than just the fact that it was such a challenge to setup that I feel I have to keep it around. So, since the primary strength of a wiki is it's collaborative nature, I put up a page that I want you, the readers, to help me fill. I created a page called Life Lessons and put a few random lessons I have learned in life that I feel I should pass on to others. What I ask of each of you reading this message is this: go to that page and add a few life lessons of your own.

You can be silly or sarcastic or serious, it's your choice. All you have to do is follow the link below and click the tab that says "edit". Don't worry about screwing anything up, one of the great things about MediaWiki is that it stores all past versions of pages so that I can revert back to one of them at anytime, so there is nothing you can do to completely screw the pooch. If you look at the stuff I have already put in you can figure out fairly easily how to format your lessons. You can even add new sections if you feel so inclined. If you put something in wrong, I can go in and fix it.

Life Lessons @ jay's wiki
Life Lessons - direct link to edit page
MediaWiki Quick Guide to markup syntax - not necessary, but possibly helpful.