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Nyland Wiki How-To

This wiki is Nyland's own instance of Bookstack, "a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information."

We're still testing it out, so the information you'll find here is certainly incomplete, and the organization of things is likely to change rapidly. However, for the knowledge that is here, you'll find it much easier to find things than before, because Bookstack has a ✨search bar✨.

Useful Parts of the BookStack Manual

Reading and Finding Information

Honestly, you can probably find everything here by clicking around; it's designed to be fairly friendly to that.

A little orientation my help. Every piece of information on this website is part of a Page. Each Page belongs to some Book, and the Pages in a Book can be further organized into Chapters. You can see all the Books on this site by clicking on the "Books" icon, in the navigation bar at the very top of every page.

Logging In

If you're reading this, then you should have an invitation to login with your Nylandish User. Contact Matt Elder if you'd like to login there but you either don't yet have an account, or if it's not simply working for you. The Nylandish Login platform uses passkeys - so once you're set up on some device, you shouldn't ever need a password to login with that user. (No passwords but secure anyway! The future is here, and it has some little bright spots! -Matt)

Making Comments

If you'd like to add notes to a page, like to ask a question, express a disagreement, or suggest edits, you can also leave comments on pages. There's an "add comment" button at the bottom of every page's content, and comments will show up at the bottom of the page. (I've left one here, as an example.)

Adding and Organizing Information

All the content on this website is written up by Nyland folk. If you're a Nyland resident, you can edit (nearly) everything you see, once you're logged in. On a computer-sized screen, you can open a content editor by clicking the "edit" link in the navigation sidebar. On a narrow screen, like on a phone, you can find the same "edit" link under the "info" tab at the top of the page.

The editor is relatively simple, and probably a familiar interface. Its shortcuts are documented here.

Feel free to tinker with things in the the Scratch Notebook; that's there explicitly so you can try things out in the editor and make arbitrary "mistakes" without damaging anything anyone will rely on later.

If you're already familiar with Markdown, you might like the Markdown editor mode. However, please switch back to the "WYSIWYG" mode before you save. Otherwise, the next user may get dropped in the Markdown editor, which may cause stress and confusion.

If you're worried about how to use all these tools, I strongly recommend [these guidelines] for styling documents on these pages.

You can also upload images with the editor's image button, and you can attach files to a page. This is a fine way to save additional files. But please do not use this as a default way to put text here. Instead, make that text be a page, or part of a page, on the site, because:

  • The contents of pages on this site are searchable, but the contents of attachments are not.
  • It's much easier for people to read a page of this website than it is for them to open a file -- especially a Word doc or Google doc, which they might not have a convenient way to read.
  • Pages are really easy to link to from other pages; attached files much less so.
  • Pages are easy for the whole community to update and keep edited (and to watch revisions of!), attached files much less so.
  • In general, this whole site works only if pages are the central content.
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