After a bit of prodding, and a couple of detours, I’ve setup a wiki listing independent Seattle coffee shops with free or nearly free wireless access.

Caffeinated and Unstrung: A Guide to Seattle’s Free Wireless Coffee Shops.

This supersedes the blog entry The Wireless Cafes and Coffee Shops of Seattle, though some help copying, and expanding on the data from that entry would be greatly appreciated.

Using the Wiki

Beyond a listing of caffeinated hotspots, the wiki is also an expirement in trying to have a moderately attractive wiki, with a moderately sensible, and self explanatory information architecture. Attractiveness is accomplished via CSS so you’ll need yourself a modern CSS understanding browser (Safari, Mozilla-kin, probably Opera though I haven’t tested it) to really participate fully. Information architecture is accomplished via backlinks, a poor man’s faceted classification (even though Kim has explained backlinks != facets).

Using backlinks for classification is a trick you see a lot on some of the old, established wikis, like BooksShelved, but it seems to have not made it the latest generations of wiki users. You flag a page as describing an item (e.g. a coffee shop) in a category (e.g. InBallard) by linking to the category (if you look at Mr. Spots you’ll see Neighborhood: InBallard). Then category pages embed a backlink tag, which automagically lists all those items. Presto, categories!

Feel free to create new cateogries on the Wiki, but try to choose good names. Current categories are geographic (InFremont, InCapitolHill, etc.), by roaster (Illy, RavensBrew) plus a handful of other like: OpenLate, IsaKlebeckBrothersCafe.

Create an Account

If you’re going to be doing a lot of hacking, create yourself an account. You do this by creating a page with your username (a valid WikiWord), and then login via the Prefrences page.

Maintainging the Look

Try starting with the NewCoffeeShopTemplate when adding a new location. Don’t feel limited however to just providing the information in the template.

Branding

Not sure about the name, don’t really have a URL for it. Caffienated and Unstrung sounded appropiate (or at least funny) at 1am this morning, it might have been contextual.

What Wiki Software is That?

A slightly tweaked version of Kwiki, which my new favorite wiki, simple but reasonably powerful, well formed HTML (making CSS styling much easier), object oriented, and imminentlyhackable. Version .20 is supposed to support a really super plugin architecture, but in the meantime I’m using a subclassed of Formatter to support backlinks. Let me know if you want it.