Popular culture projects

I have been editing the project pages. Little by little I keep adding new themed projects. When people think about dollhouses or miniatures in general they have no clue how much we are inspired by the culture around us: books, music, movies and tv series, e.g.

Beatrix Potter
Harry Potter
Lord of the Ring
Moomins
Narnia
Pingu
Gnomes by Will Huygen & Rien Poortvliet .


Do you have any pop culture projects on-going? Tell me and the rest of the world via the wiki (or by commenting here).

10 blog followers

Cool, I have now here already 10 followers, congrats to Pubdolls - you was the number 10. And thanks to Debbie, who has brought me new readers today by posting about the wiki.

PS. I have problems with Sitemeter & PBworks combination, I don't see the referring urls there. Can someone help?

Wiki slogan and a story behind

A site and service needs a slogan, right?

In the morning I found the slogan from my head:

Mini treasures wiki - Connecting dollhouse people.

I love it, do you? :) The true meaning of the wiki is to help us to connect with each others.

I started this hobby back in 2000. In that time I didn't know anyone doing dollhouses and but then I found Yahoo groups and was thrilled - I'm not the only nut :). I started to network with other miniaturists in Finland and a little bit outside Finland too - now one of my best friends are found via the hobby.

When the hobby was hardening in Finland I quit the foreign groups and started to promote the hobby in the web in Finnish. I established own Yahoo group with my 2 friends, Nukkekotielämä in 2002 and that group is really special: in 2004 we build a dollhouse together and in 2005 we published the very first dollhouse hobby book in Finnish. Our other projects are recorded in our common web page.

My dollhouse web pages (started 2003) were pioneering in Finland and in 2005 I started one of the first dollhouse blogs in Finland. In 2006 I started the Finnish Dollhouse wiki (Nukkekotiwiki) and by now it has found its place among the dollhouse enthusiasts.

Now it's time for me to go back to the roots and start dealing with miniaturists around the world again. :) Back in 2000 it was nice to find someone who do dollhouses but now that we are so many in web I want to mainly find my soul mates: someone who does similar projects than me. My wiki can help me in that and I hope it will work for you too. Whether your dollhouse is occupied by skeletons, Sylvanian families or James Carrington originals, whether your dollhouses are in 1600s or 2000s, in Rome, London or NY, whether your dollhouse shops sell candies or hardware Mini treasures wiki will help you in finding similar projects.

I'm so thrilled about this since I know that if I succeed with the wiki it can change the way we all do this hobby!

Projects - my favorite page

I just added the first version of my favorite page to wiki, projects. Like many miniaturists, I'm a collector and I have many miniature collections e.g.:
bags
cat figures and stuff
masks
food, especially fish
rubber ducks and Donald Ducks ...

When the collection has grown enough it's time to use them in a themed project. In a normal dollhouse you can't have that many cakes, but in a cafeteria you can. And if you collect paintings you could use them in an atelier. What is your favorite project and what do you collect?

Shops / Etsy

Creating the structure to Shops page is a challenge, there are so many shops out there - how to make a user-friendly listing out of them?

I guess I just need to start with it and then improve it later. :) The first page is for shops in Etsy, another one is for shops in Finland (which contains only links to Nukkekotiwiki currently but feel free to add more:).

FAQ added

A lot of posts today... I have added FAQ page - it is meant for all those big and silly questions you have always wanted to ask about dollhouses or miniatures.

Wiki what?

I was thinking about the naming question and realized I haven't even introduced the wiki term here. Ups!

So let's go to Common Craft and let them explain it to you:



So a wiki is a web page anyone can edit. Maintaining link lists is a pain since they keep changing/disappearing but if there is a big group editing the wiki regularly the pages will be up-to-date. Collecting all dollhouse related links into one place is a huge effort but together we can easily make it. Go to Editing instructions to find out how PBworks is updated and start contributing by sharing your favorite links :).

Geocities is shutting down

Another change in services: Geocities is closing by the end of this year. Actually it is not that big surprise, the blogs are so much easier to update that I haven't updated my Geocities pages for ages.

PBwiki is now PBworks

The wiki service we are using for Mini treasures wiki changed their name from PBwiki to PBworks:

What we have now is not just some user-friendly generic wiki; it’s an increasingly full-featured hosted collaboration environment, used by tens of thousands of companies around the world to get their work done. It became clear that ‘wiki’ was caging us in.

I didn't know about this change until now so I need to think about this - should I change the name of my service too? The official term is now Mini treasures wiki but should I change it to Mini treasures work? Or maybe I should just use the url: http://minitreasures.pbworks.com/ .

Wiki is a well known term, if you are in a wiki you know that you can edit it. Work is of course more familiar term than wiki but doesn't make sense in this context... If I rename the site Mini treasures portal or Mini treasures web is it then clear that you can also edit it?

Any ideas my friends, I'm hoping to hear comments before making the decision? :)

Dollhouses by manufacturers (e.g. Lundby)

I added a new page for Dollhouses by manufacturers, see e.g. the page for Lundby. Do you have a Lundby? Do you have picturers of it in Internet? Tell me or add your links to the wiki by yourself, here are the instructions for editing.

Mini treasures in Digg.com

I added an article to Digg.com about the new Mini treasures wiki. Please help me spreading the news by digging it :).

Wiki page naming conventions

Yesterday I was thinking about the naming conventions for the wiki pages. Giving examples is the best way to describe them.

Blog pages are named like this:
blogs (includes links to sub pages)
blogs_english
blogs_spanish

Forum pages:
forums (includes links to sub pages)
forums_english

Home pages:
home_pages (includes links to sub pages)
home_pages_english
home_pages_japanese


Photos:
photos (includes links to sub pages)
photos_flickr
photos_picasa

Capital Letters are not used in page names (only the pages named by the PBwiki system have Capitals: FrontPage and SideBar).

If you establish a new wiki page, please follow these rules - otherwise I'll rename your page :).

List of all pages in the wiki

Wiki calendar added

Yesterday I added calendar to Mini treasures wiki. It's empty now but as time goes by I'll add wiki happenings there. Also if there are any global dollhouse events (on-line) they can be promoted in it. For countries/regions please add a calendar of their own, see the example in Nukkekotiwiki calendar for Finnish happenings.

Mini treasures in many languages

I added links to Google translation to the main page with the following languages:
Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Japanese and Spanish. This is so cool :). The Finnish translation is not that good, I hope that other languages work better.

Amazon links added to books

Where to buy links have been added to Books page. From Amazon links you can see the cover of the book, sometimes also the inside pages or reader reviews. I hope you add your comments to the wiki tables itself. :) Have I missed your favorite book? Go and add it yourself. First you need an account and then you can start editing.

Wiki visitors in a world map

I haven't really started the wiki promo yet so looking at this map makes me really happy:

.

There are miniaturists in very many countries already who have found the wiki! Great!

Mini treasures in Japanese!

Via Sitemeter's hitcounter I noticed somebody had translated Mini treasures to Japanese.

Are you using these Google translation services, are they any good?

Amazon links added

I added links to Amazon to this blog as well as the wiki's magazines page, later I add those to books page too. I might be soon unemployed and that's the reason I need to carefully think about my future. Making a living from a hobby sounds a dream come true so of course I need to try it out (otherwise I would later regret) but if I get only some small checks a year that is really nice too :). Wish me luck! You can support me e.g. by starting to order your Amazon books via my blog (go the the end of the page for the Amazon ad), the prices are the same as always but they will pay me a share of their profit.

Dollhouse inhabitants

If you ask a passer-by who does live in a dollhouse they will answer: dolls of course. But since making miniatures is mainly about using your imagination you can do better than that, why not use teddy bears, mouses or giraffes? Go wild!

I created a page for dollhouse inhabitants and added some links to the pages I mentioned there. Who is living in your dollhouse or roombox, any surprises there?

Mini treasures button

A wiki needs a logo of course and that's what I just created. You can add this button to your home pages with a link to the wiki.

Books and photos added

Updating the new wiki is rather easy, just copy-pasting from the old Finnish wiki. And then a little editing on both...

I added books. The only reasonable format of presenting this information is tables - too bad that editing them is not always so easy. I didn't want to translate the Finnish book reviews so I left most of the fields empty so that other users can fill them. I hope you do!

Then I added photo albums. Pictures are so essential in this hobby, we don't need to understand the language used but all of us understand the amazing mini pictures. I know there are thousands of photo albums available out there so I divided the photo albums by services: Flickr, Fotki, Gfoto, Kuvat.fi, Ovi Share, Photobucket, Picasa, Picturetrail, PixBox, Webshots. It seems that Flickr is the most popular right now but let's see what happens when you start adding links to your favorite albums. Photo albums of Finnish miniaturists are collected here, do you know if other nationalities have same kind of lists?

Promoting Mini treasures

Do you have any ideas how to promote the new wiki? I tried Wikipedia.org but the link was removed because the site is not mature enough, i.e. not long enough history and not enough editors. Well, it's almost 2 days old now and there has been 2 editors in addition to me, why that is not enough? ;) I've been telling about the new wiki to my dollhouse friends and some of them have forwarded the news to their friends. I'm also hoping that once people find out that they are getting visitors from my wiki they are eager enough to study it further.

But before starting the big wiki promo campaign I need more content. :)

I started with blogs but now there's pages also for:
forums
home pages
magazines and
printables .

In near future I'll add the shops but before that I need to figure out how I structure the shop pages, by countries, by languages, by continents, by names (alphabetically), by the way they are selling, by assortment... Any ideas for that?

PS. This blog has been added to Blogilista and Blogged.

Mini treasures wiki

I just created a new wiki called Mini treasures. The name miniatures was already taken and I didn't want to take dollhouse / dolls house because not all miniaturist have a house, they can do e.g. roomboxes or just collect miniatures one by one. So I used the Mini treasures name from this blog and thought that this will be the place where I post about wiki news.

The first thing I added there was lists of miniature blogs:
Dutch blogs
English blogs
Finnish blogs
French blogs
Italian blogs
Japanese blogs
Portuguese blogs
Spanish blogs
Swedish blogs