I am proud to announce the immediate availability of the first book about Tiki — Tiki Essentials. Currently, Tiki Essentials is available for purchase through LuLu.com and Amazon.com, with other retailers coming soon!

For details (including discount pricing!!), see http://tikiforsmarties.com/Books.

Finally... my own domain: ricksapir.com
Better late then never....

Hi, I'm Rick! I've been using Tiki since early 2005, when I selected TikiWiki as the CMS for my primary website: KeyContent.org.

I am first and foremost an End-user Advocate — not a hard-core programmer. I have nearly 15 years of experience in usability, documentation, and training (primarily with computer software, but other fields too). My primary contributions to the Tiki community are:

• Monitoring the Forums and IRC channel, helping when I can.
• Working on the Tiki Docs
• Contribution useful plugins and mods, where I can.
  It has been a long time since I've done any real coding (does anyone still use Pascal and Fortran?), so most of my code contributions can surely be improved. You can read about some of my Tiki ideas modifications in my Tiki blog.
• Monitoring the TikiWiki feedback.
• Working the Tiki Promo Squad to improve Tiki's pubic image (or lack-there-of)

If you're new to Tiki, I encourage you to check out my online book: TikiWiki for Dummies Smarties — A beginner's guide to using TikiWiki. If you've used the guide and found it useful (or even if you didn't!), I'd love to have your comments.

Additionally, if you want to contribute to Smarties, that would be great too.

The easiest way to get Smart is by using the Smarties toolbar:

It provides instant (and constant) access to TikiWiki for Dummies Smarties, anytime you're online. Get it here.

I've been asked by several people.... "What does the 99 (in ricks99) signify?" Here's the story:

In the old days (back when 1200bps was fast and Prodigy was bigger than AOL), I got involved in BBSing. On one of the first sites I logged into, I tried to select ricks as my username, but it was already taken. So I tried ricks1 and it was taken too. Then I tried ricks2, but it was taken too.

Rather than continuing up number list, I decided to start at the top and work my way down. I started with ricks99. It worked, and the rest, as they say, is history.

This page has become too long (and out of date). So, I started a Tiki Blog to describe and document my peronsal Tiki journey. Enjoy....

Currently, I admin the following Tiki-based sites:

http://www.keycontent.org ))KeyContent.org(( Completely customized theme with 4.x. You can read the details on my How Did They Do It page.	http://www.noah-noelle.com Noah-Noelle An online store, modeled after eBay.	http://www.hawkinsrun.org Hawkins Run Using a modified Eatlon (from themes.tiki.org).
http://www.stc-carolina.org Completely customized theme.	http://newsletter.stc-carolina.org Carolina Communiqué An online newsletter using a completely customized theme. 2009, 2008 APEX Award of Excellence winner.	http://twbasics.keycontent.org TikiWiki for Smarties A beginner's guide to TikiWiki, using a completely customized theme. 2008-9 STC Award of Merit winner. Read more about this project.
http://www.stc-techedit.org STC Technical Editing SIG Using a modified Feb12 (from themes.tiki.org). 2008-9 STC Community of Distinction winner.

Did you know that you can use Tiki's Flash plugin to embed more than flash movies? Lots of Web 2.0 widgets use Flash to deliver content.

For example, here's my Shelfari bookshelf:
{FLASH(movie="http://www.shelfari.com/ws/shelf.swf?username=o1516354300&booksize=small",width=>500,height=>250,quality=>high)}{FLASH}

This was created with the code:

{FLASH(movie="http://www.shelfari.com/ws/shelf.swf?username=XXXXXX",width=>325,height=>465,quality=>high)}{FLASH}

Tiki does Pandora, too. Here's what I'm listening to:

{FLASH(movie="https://www.pandora.com/radio/tuner_8_2_0_2_pandora.swf",width=>640,height=>528,quality=>high)}{FLASH}

• Ricks99