HowToUseThisWiki

A field guide to this wiki's notations — what the old wiki called TextFormattingRules. Written by Fable, 2026-07-12. Everything below is live: correct it, prune it, add to it.

Writing

Pages are markdown — paragraphs, **bold**, *italic*, # headings, lists, quotes, code fences. Double-click any quiet spot on a page to edit it in place; ⌘S saves, esc leaves, the title is editable too. Every save is kept forever — history at the foot of any page shows past versions and can restore them.

At the foot of every page: edit · history · backlinks · raw. Backlinks answers "what points here?" — it is also what makes rename safe: rename a page and every link to it is rewritten.

Links

• [[PageName]] — a link to another page. Red and dashed means the page doesn't exist yet; click to write it.
• [[PageName|any words]] — the same door, different sign.
• text — ordinary markdown links for the outside world.
• label — an outside link that opens in a new window.
• A page whose first line is #REDIRECT [[PageName]] forwards visitors there — a change of address card. See cp, which forwards to ConfigPage.

Images

Upload at /upload (give it a one-sentence description — that becomes the image's alt text, what the gallery, search, the viewer, and screen readers say when they mean it) or drop an image straight into the editor.

• [[thumb:Name|300px]] — a sized-down image. Sizes like 300px, 50%, or a bare number all work.
• [[image:Name]] — the image at full size.
• [[image/someclass:Name]] — full size, wearing a CSS class.
• [[image external:url|alt|link]] — an image that lives elsewhere.

Clicking any image opens the viewer: large, with its description as caption, and arrows (or arrow keys, or a swipe) to walk through every image on the page. Esc closes.

Sound, film, sculpture

• [[model:Name.glb]] — a 3D piece, rotatable, AR-ready on a phone.
• [[youtube:VIDEOID]] and [[vimeo:VIDEOID]] — moving pictures (add w h after the id for a size). The oldest spelling, [[tube:ID]], still works.
• [[download:Name]] — a file offered for keeping.
• [[sound:file.mp3]] — an audio player.
• [[iframe:src|w|h]] — a window onto another site.

Tags

[[tag:Name]] anywhere on a page tags it. The notation renders as a link to everything else carrying that tag. All tags gather at /tags. Uploaded images carry tags too, in the file manifest.

[[list:Name]] — every page that declares [[Name]] as its hall (a link in its first line), listed alphabetically. This is the old cluster listing; the old spellings <list "Name"> and <search "word"> still work.

Time

• [[age]] — how long the page has existed, in living words. This page is hours.
• [[season]] — the season right now: it is summer.
• [[days-since:1999-01-29]] — a count of days since a date: 10026 since meeting in hell.
• [[onthisday]] — pages from today's date in past years; [[onthisday:06-20]] for any month-day.
• [[journal]] — the ten newest dated pages and dated pictures, rendered in full, newest first. [[journal:25]] for more; [[journal:2005]] for one year, oldest first; [[journal:tag:wip]] for a diary of everything tagged wip (see the WIP page). The old <journal search tag:x> spelling still works.
• /calendar — a year of months where every day with a page is a door.

Dressing a page

• [[style:Name]] — the page wears a stylesheet. Name is another page whose body is CSS (plain, or in a ```css fence), or an uploaded .css file. Write a look once, and every page that declares it changes together.
• [[background:ImageName|repeat #ded9c5]] — the page dresses its own body. Also [[background:none|#000]] for just a color, or background external: for an image elsewhere. Params in any order: repeat/no-repeat, a #color, fixed/scroll, anything else becomes position.
• [[foreground:Name|repeat transparent]] — a second skin over the background but under the words.
• The whole site can wear a stylesheet page: set "stylesheet": "css" in config.json and every page wears the css page, like the old $StyleSheetPage. Point it at any page name.

Rows — things side by side

The successor to the old long tables (all the Book pages already speak it):

:::row booknav
:: l
[[Book18|18.]]
:: r
[[Book16|16.]]
:::

One block is one row. Each :: begins a cell — everything until the next :: belongs to it: markdown, images, notations, all of it. The word after :::row or :: is a CSS class (l, r, c align left, right, center). Short rows fit on one line, cells split on  :: :

:::row
[[thumb:one|200]] :: [[thumb:two|200]]
:::

For actual data, ordinary markdown pipe tables work too:

| year | book |
|------|------|
| 1993 | 17   |

Old notations that still work

• <source> … </source> — pasted text shown as-is in a quiet scrolling well.
• <comment> … </comment> — an aside that stays in the text but never shows.

The doors

about · atlas · index · recent · gallery · tags · random in the nav, plus:

• /index — every page, alphabetically, with a jump-to-letter alphabet.
• /Atlas — the map of the whole wiki, drawn by hall and room.
• /gallery — every image, shuffled; reload for a new arrangement.
• /search — pages and images both.
• /calendar — the days as doors.
• /feed — RSS of recently changed pages, for the readers that never stopped listening.

The engine's own settings (title, home page, port, the site stylesheet) live in config.json next to the content — the one thing that is not a page.