Web 0.1: The Twiki wiki

Piece of advice for people who don’t understand search engines: if you’re going to make a mass-market product (like a Wiki), then do NOT make the standard setup – for every customer! – automatically include a link on *every page* that goes back to the front page of the installed software, but which has the same link name as the name of your product.

Try it out: search for anything non-trivial about “twiki” on google: unfortunately, most searches fail, because of this shortsighted idea – note how *any twiki anywhere on the internet* appears to search engines to be about Twiki-the-platform, even though most of them are not. Doh.

Sigh. Basic failure to understand how search engines will (have to) view your content? Decision to do something that, really, doesn’t make sense in the first place and is confusing even to humans? It’s a bit touch and go, but I reckon this is another example of Web 0.1.

3 replies on “Web 0.1: The Twiki wiki”

or is this a web.01failure to understand how to use a search engine?

its pretty ‘well known’ that adding site:twiki.org will give you results from …. twiki.org

(OK, ok, I admit, I’m one of the longer term developers of TWiki, and I also would have preferred that the TWiki web had been called the Documentation web)

Thanks. Sorry, I didn’t say anything about ways around it for the user – that works for you and me, but not for the average IT dept staff, let alone the average google user (in frustration I have hit people – who OUGHT to know these things – over the head with the GoogleHacks book before, metaphorically speaking, but my experience is that most IT depts don’t know this stuff, sadly). And it’s not even just knowing the site: term – I’ve found many people say, in situations like this, “oh, yeah, I knew about THAT, I just didn’t think of using it”. Sigh.

Keep up the good work with TWiki!

To be fair I’ll live with this when you consider the advantages of Twiki (imo) compared to other wiki software in terms of markup and useability.

My employer of three years used twiki, incidentally, and I have it on my shared hosting account (which was…not fun…to install)

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