Introduction

Part of the infrastructure of the new CSE building is a location-sensing system, which devices such as laptops and handheld computers can use to find their location within the building. To show off this and the other cool parts of the building, we're working on an electronic tour guide application. Our program runs on a handheld computer and shows the user where they are on a map, with Web links to nearby rooms and other points of interest. It can also provide interactive directions to other rooms in the building. If you'd like to see a demonstration or learn more, I'd be more than happy to oblige. Please contact Scott Gifford at gifford@umich.edu.

The Recruitment and Admissions folks are incorporating this tour guide software into the tours for prospective students, and we're using it in the upcoming building open house. For quite a few people, this will be part of their first impression of our department, so we'd like the information to be as interesting and complete as possible.

The tour guide information is created from a Wiki, a Web site that anybody can edit, using the DokuWiki software. You can browse and edit it at the address:

 http://rfidsrv.eecs.umich.edu/csebuilding

Because the information will be displayed on the small screen of a handheld computer, please keep it simple. If you use images, keep them small, and don't use things like Flash or Java, since they probably won't work.

Getting Around

Creating or Editing a Room

The Wiki lives at http://rfidsrv.eecs.umich.edu/csebuilding, so you should start by visiting there.

Rooms are arranged by floor, so once you're there, select the floor of the room you'd like to work on. You'll see a list of rooms and their title. Rooms are currently listed in the order they were entered, so make sure you look through the whole list (you can use your Web browser's find feature to search for a room within the page).

If you find the room, click on it to view the page. If you'd like to add or change something, click on the "Edit this page" button. See Links and Formatting below for more details.

If you don't find the room, adding it to the list is pretty easy:

1. On the page listing all the rooms on the floor, click the Edit this page button at the top or bottom.
2. Once you start editing, there will be a text editing area in the middle of the page. Scroll to the bottom of this area, and place your cursor below the last room listed.
3. Press the Unordered List Item button.
4. Type in the room number over the words Unordered List Item. Be sure to use the exact room number as it appears on the door, or the tour won't recognize it; you'll have a chance to enter the room name later.
5. Highlight the room number you just entered, and click on the Internal Link button.
6. If you'd like to add more rooms, return to Step 1 and keep going!

Once you've done this a few times, you may find it's faster to type in the link by hand. Feel free to do that; it's just spaces, asterisks, and square brackets.

When you've finished adding rooms, click on the Preview button. The edited page will appear in a light blue box on the preview page. You should see your new rooms in the bottom in red. If there are any problems, use the text editor to change the page, and keep editing and previewing as much as you'd like. When you're happy with the page, click on the Save button above the blue preview window.

You'll return to the new page for the floor, which should have your rooms at the bottom in red. For each room, click on the red link, then click Create this page to create a new page for that room.

Links and Formatting

Pages in the tour are simple Web pages. They can contain formatting, such as bold and italics, headings, images, and links to other pages. The pages are formatted by putting a few simple characters around your words, and buttons will put in most of the special characters for you, so you can concentrate on what you want to say. You'll always have a chance to preview the page before saving it, so feel free to experiment a little bit to figure out how things work. Also, your changes won't automatically be saved if you accidentally close the Web browser window or your computer crashes, so make sure you preview and save the page every few minutes to avoid losing your work.

Page title

The first heading in the page is important, because it will be used as the title of the page in the tour. To create the first heading, click on the Level 1 Headline button, then type in the name of the page. Please keep it short; remember that tour guide users will be seeing it on a very small screen, so anything beyond 20 or so characters won't show up

Links

To create a link to a Web page, press the External Link button. Type in the full address (URL) of the Web page (including the http:// part), followed by a vertical bar (the | symbol), followed by the text of the link. For example, a link to the University's main page would look like:

[[http://www.umich.edu|University of Michigan]]

If there is nothing on a page besides a title and a single link, the title will be displayed as part of the tour, and when clicked will take the user immediately to the linked page, skipping the Wiki page altogether. This is useful when an appropriate page for a room already exists, such as a faculty page or lab page.

To create a link to another page within the Wiki (such as another room), press the Internal Link button, then type in the room number. Its name will appear automatically. If you'd like something else to appear instead, after the room number type a vertical bar (the | character) followed by the text of the link.

Text Formatting

For simple text formatting, highlight the words you'd like to format, then use these buttons:

• Bold (like this)
• Italic (like this)
• Underline (like this)
• Typewriter Font (like this)
• Strike-through (like this)

Headings and Sub-Headings

To create headings and subheadings, use the Level 1 Headline through Level 5 Headline buttons. While the first heading is special and is used for the title of the page, any other headings are just for your own formatting. You can use them to organize a page into sections.

Lists

You can create numbered lists using the Ordered List Item button, and bulleted lists using the Unordered List Item button. For either of these, first press the button, then type in the text for that item. To create nested lists, use spaces to indent more deeply nested items further than less deeply nested ones.

Horizontal Divider Lines

Use the Horizontal Rule button to draw a horizontal line across the page.

Images

If you'd like to use small images on the page (remember they'll have to fit on the very small screen of a PDA), you can use the Add Images and other files button. Click it to get to the Mediafile Selection window, which will let you choose an existing image or upload a new one.

To upload a new image, use the Browse... button at the bottom of the window, then select the image file on your computer (to use an image from another Web page, first save it to your computer). This will make a copy of the image on the Wiki server to be included in your page.

Once the image you'd like to use is included, simply click on it to insert it into the page where the cursor currently is. To include the same image multiple times, you only need to upload it once; after that just select it from the list of already uploaded images.

For more information, see the DokuWiki Formatting Syntax documentation.

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