My main experience with mediawiki has been a project at work setting up our own Wiki on the company intranet. The project began with the idea of being a training resource but it has evolved continually into something much bigger. We are now storing a database of all the equipment and using the talk pages to keep maintenance records. It’s a long project that will never be completely finished but it keeps me interested at work and makes some of the down time go by faster.
At a recent meeting our IT guy brought up the idea of using Windows’ Problem Step Recorder to help create screenshots and tutorials. I had never heard of the software but it works quite well and is great for showing step by step instructions on a computer interface.
I began to research if we could embed these recordings in the mediawiki and found out very quickly that Mediawiki does not like .mht’s. Much like other file types that could have code to hijack the system .mht’s are on the Mediawiki blacklist and even after I experimented by removing them from the list I still couldn’t upload the file type.
I decided the best work around to still use the PST was to create the files and then store them in our file server. Using UNC links I can have links on a page that take the user to the tutorial needed. Now Internet Explorer is the only browser that nativley will open a .mht so I went searching again and found extensions for both Firefox and Chrome. I primarily use Chrome when I’m doing anything on the Wiki so this tab will be very helpful any time I need IE functionality.
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