Why I have been away from you...

You might have noticed that I have not been with you for a long time but now I am back. What was I doing then?

First I was planning my research exchange time and then doing it: me and my family spent 6 weeks in Graz, Austria to study social media in automotive industry. Boy was it interesting! It is always to work in foreign country and learn about new cultures. The visit was in November-December so me, an old Christmas fan, was been spoiled by different goodies Graz has to offer, e.g. Christmas fairs. :) Loved it! During the Christmas time I was promoting our advent calendar but the main work was done by Linda, thank heavens we have her onboard!

After we came back to Finland we had of course plenty to do, e.g. meeting the family we had not met during Christmas. But I was busy with other things too.

The loveliest dollhouse blog in Finnish, Nukkekoti Väinölä

Source: maria-malmstrom.blogspot.fi via Johanna on Pinterest

Before I started Mini treasures wiki I had another wiki, Nukkekotiwiki, a wiki about dollhouses in Finnish. After all the time I spend with you the first wiki was lacking my attention so last year I decided to give some love for it too. My idea was to host a contest: the cutest dollhouse blog in Finnish. First I planned to run it after the summer but something happened: a major Finnish blog service called Vuodatus crashed. And it deleted the photos of its users from several years! Many dollhouse bloggers were using Vuodatus so to give them more time to recover I postponed the contest till the end of the year. The deadline for voting was 15th January and since then I have been telling the results day by day. The top ten bloggers are found on a Pinterest board.

Aamulehti interviewed me for CMAD, I am the lady on the right

Source: twitter.com via Johanna on Pinterest

But this is still not all! I am not only the community manager of Mini treasures and Nukkekotiwiki but I run other communities as well. Being a community manager is one of my passions - I want to learn how to do it well and how to get the most out of you. This is the reason I brought Community Manager Appreciation Day to Finland last year. Last year we were about 15 persons in that event but this year we were 150! And I was still one of the main organizers of the event. So you can guess I was busy with that event, I was thinking that it was almost like my wedding (we had the same amount of visitors back in 2000): I had been inviting a big group of people to celebrate a day (party) with me and to hear the speaches we had chosen for them. I WAS nervous but luckily everything went quite well.

So now my life is back to so called "normal mode". Of course I still have a business to run and a family to mother but nothing so special so should be able to spend some weekly hours with you from now on. :) I just wanted you to know why I stayed away from you for such a long time - hope you understand now better.

Mini treasures is not part of my business (yet) but just a hobby. I got the bill from the Pbworks again, 499$ a year. An expensive hobby I have, don't I? If I want to make my living out of Mini treasures we would need to get 100 times as much as visitors than we currently (14 000 montly visitors) have or to get our visitors to buy 100 times more from Amazon using our affiliate links (e.g. Mini treasures store). The combination would be easiest to achieve: 10 times more visitors and 10 times more Amazon shopping. So the next time you are thinking to buy something from Amazon, use one of our links. Consider also if you can promote MTW to your mini friends - it will encourage me to pay the Pbworks bill again next year.

Till later friends, I have been missing you!

Behind the bed / scenes

You know Linda, my co-moderator. She partipated a canopy bed project with a group of miniaturists and shared the results in the Littleroomers blog. She emailed the group and I was added as cc and I wanted to publish the email in this blog too. Go ahead Linda and tell your story!

This post was made to the Dollhouse Mini Projects digest after the group completed a project and the participants consented to have their beds featured.

Now, anyone who completes their bed and wishes to be included in the post, please send me a pic and the description and I will add them.
I also put a link on the Bed page of the wiki

I also wrote about the technique of lace and embossed paper on the furniture page with a link to the blog illustrating the technique.

Scroll down to the last tip, and click on the here link.

What is a a Minitreasures wiki, you ask? It is the same as the wiki-pedia whicb we all use, only for miniatures. I suppose we could call it a mini-pedia! Here is the link to wikipedia which talks about PB works, the wiki site used by MTW.

I don't know about you, but I have frantically saved all sorts of tips, sites, pictures throughout the years, but have great trouble locating the info. The wiki enables me to save links to specific subjects on pages, which can inter-connect, and to share that info with others.
Go to http://minitreasures.pbworks.com/w/page/20981680/FrontPage
Beds are furniture, right? If you enter furniture in the search box on the upper right, the drop down menu offers 2 selections. The folder contains a list of all pages related to furniture. The page (with the little pencil to indicate editing) offers a generic page for general tips and info that apply to furniture in general.

This format kinda fits my tiny little OCD mind. I can't get my mind wrapped around Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, but I can understand a dictionary!
Hope this explains about the wiki a bit. Look on Youtube for some tutorials

Linda McD from NOTL, Ontario
aka minilinda2001
http://picasaweb.google.ca/minilinda2001

The wiki is upgraded again

Usch - I just paid for the second upgrade, we have now got yet another year for premium version of PBworks. I think last year the payment was something like 100 dollars - now it is nearly 500$. It feels kind of lot for a hobby project but I guess I need to continue with the premium version so that we are not loosing anything (members nor data) and to keep spammers away from it.

In case you would like to help me with the payment you can easily do it by
- making Amazon purchases using the links from our wiki
- donating via PayPal (just let me know your email address, mine is the same old)
- buying fan products from our Cafe Press shop.

And if you do not have any money or will to use for monetizing Mini treasures wiki at the moment don't worry, I am sure someone (like me) is taking care it for you. :)

But if you do want to spoil yourself see if there are any nice books here you'd need to get:



Take care wiki friends!

How to embed Flickr photos in Pbworks

I was sure I had shared this presentation in this blog earlier but could not find it. :( So now that the advent calendar time is very near it is time refresh our memory and see how easy it is to add Flickr pictures to our wiki. There are still some pages available so go and reserve yours before it is too late :).

How to embed flickr photos in pbworks

View more presentations from jjanhone.

Improved wiki editor

Just found out that the PBworks editor was improved, the content copied from Word works better now and there is option "save and ontinue". Read more

PS. To give the credit to those it belongs I am concepting "MTW Award" - the people bringing most traffic to our wiki will be featured on wiki's birthday. Are you one of them? :)

Adding Twitter feed to Pbworks

I have tried to add the RSS feed from @minitreasures Twitter tweets to PBworks (minitreasures.pbworks.com) with no luck so far. I need to find e.g. a Google gadget that is showing feeds. Can someone help?

***

It was good that I asked - after asking I realized I am using the gadget already here (blog). I added it to the wiki and it is working - thsnks for support :)

Our wiki is premium now

It was a tough decision but I was pushed to do it: I bought a premium version for one year for Mini treasures wiki. This was the first time I paid for an Internet service and I was not that happy to do it. I am giving a lot of my free time for improving the wiki and I thought it should be enough. But it was not, now also my money is envolved...

But with the earlier free version of PBworks I could not do as much as I wanted.

E.g. any spammer could come and add links to our main page or sidebar. :( Linda, my right hand, told me that she could not do proper searches any more. And when I posted links to Facebook it refused to show the pictures like it used to do. :(

But now those problems are solved :).

With premium version I was also able to add a logo which is now shown in every page. :) If you click it you will be landing to the main page. And the most visible change for you: I was able to customize the colors. :)

Tell me if you have any problems with the new wiki!

And now something with small print:
If there are wiki lovers out there who want to help me in raising the money there are several options. You can buy stuff from our Cafe Press shop or buy books or other stuff from Amazon using the links in the wiki (e.g. from the books page). And as I am a miniaturists I wouldn´t mind if you decide to send something small for me, e.g. one of those mini treasures that are shown in our pool... In that case ask me to send my address as I don´t want to share that in public. A sponsorship deal is worth negotiating too.

But don´t get me wrong now: I am not pushing you to pay me (like PBworks kind of did to me): the wiki remains free of charge for readers and you can add links to your favorite sites and shops as you wish. Have fun there - I certainly do. :)f

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 :).

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? :)