PsyCrit

PsyCrit's Main Page (visible portion) on August 13, 2020 : Everything under "Blog" and "Commentaries" is assembled by SMW queries from separate pages.

PsyCrit is a web site I designed for J. E. R. Staddon, professor emeritus at Duke University, using sample artwork and design suggestions he provided.

After an initial attempt to create the site using Drupal, I ended up setting it up in July 2006 as a MediaWiki site, using w3tpl tags and some custom code to manage certain data relationships. This turned out to be fragile, and by July 2020 I completely replaced those functions with Semantic MediaWiki (SMW).

The site uses a custom MediaWiki skin, using an owl photo he sent me and some lettering and shading I did in PaintShop Pro.

Data Relationships

The core of the site consists of original responses to science-related articles ("targets"), mostly in academic journals but sometimes in more popular contexts.

• A wiki page is created for each "target" article, using SMW to note information about the article in a way which can be shown elsewhere in different formats as needed.
• A wiki page is create for each "response" article, again using SMW to note key information.
• SMW queries are then used to display:
  • a list of responses, by date (most recent first), on the front page
  • a list of responses for each target article (most only have one, but some have more), on each target's page
  • on each response's page, a summary of the target being responded to and a link back to the target's page
  • blog posts, which are similarly indexed using SMW

Pages are normally created using:

• HTML forms, defined within a wiki page using w3tpl to enable raw HTML output and show some variable information
• MakePage, an extension I wrote which creates wiki pages from a template plus submitted form data (POST or GET)