Some of the friends and community members who’ve been with AboutUs since the beginning will remember that we used to be based on MediaWiki, the collaborative software that powers Wikipedia and countless other sites. With 15 million pages and more added every day, we’ve since outgrown MediaWiki.
But that doesn’t mean traces of our software don’t have the occasional positive side. One such advantage is that many of the scripts that power users of the FireFox browser employ through Greasemonkey work on both MediaWiki and AboutUs.
One such user script can create a presentation from your MediaWiki pages. The script also works just fine on AboutUs, which means you can create a slideshow using freely-licensed AboutUs content without every touching PowerPoint.
If you want to try it out follow these four simple steps:
- Install Greasemonkey for Firefox, if you haven’t already. The word scripts sounds intimidating, but all it takes is a couple clicks.
- Add MediaWiki Presentation to your list of scripts. To do so just click the “Install” link on the script page.
- Go to your favorite AboutUs page and click the “start presentation” link. The link will appear automatically underneath the navigation tabs near the top of the page (see screenshot below).
- Watch as the different sections of the AboutUs page get turned into slides you can click through in your browser.
For AboutUs pages that have been improved even a little bit, this script is the easiest way to get a presentation about a website and organization with all the basic information you might need. If it’s currently missing some information you think is fitting, you’re more than welcome to add it yourself.
Now that you’re a Greasemonkey user, you should also check out the AboutUs Helper script. If you’ve got any suggestions of other scripts to try, please let us know in the comments.
