Nathan Wailes - Blog - GitHub - LinkedIn - Patreon - Reddit - Stack Overflow - Twitter - YouTube

Confluence (Business Tool)

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Nov 17, 2019
6 min read

Table of contents

Child pages

Related pages

  • ...

Tasks

  • Create a bookmarklet and a keyboard shortcut where I can press some keyboard combination and have copied to my clipboard linked text, where the URL is the current page and the text is in the format 'YYYY.MM.DD - Domain.TLD - Title of Page'

How I use my wiki

  • I use it to work out what I should think about a variety of subjects. It's like when you work out a math problem on paper: you write things down to help you keep track of a complicated problem so you can focus on only a small part of it at a time. A good example of this kind of problem is, "When should I combine subjects into a single wiki page and when should I have them as separate wiki pages?"
  • I like to write my thoughts in Notepad as soon as I have them and then later transfer them to my wiki when I have time.

Best practices for using a Confluence wiki

Naming pages

  • If users will be often reading the page name in the child page / sidebar list, it may be a good idea to name the page with the specific designation first and the general designation second (e.g. if the parent page is named "Mobile", then the child page should be named "Development Frameworks (Mobile)" rather than "Mobile Development Frameworks").

How to get all of the random thoughts that come to you through the day onto your wiki

  1. Jot down ideas as they come to you in a single Notepad++ tab that you keep open at all times. Preface each note with a keyword (preferably the name of the wiki page where it should go) so you can quickly categorize the notes later;  for example, "gym:"
    1. You do this instead of immediately adding the thought to your wiki because it reduces the 'cost' (in terms of your time) of writing the idea down.
  2. When you have a lot of notes, break up the big single text file into multiple text files, where each text file corresponds to a page on your wiki.
    1. Have your always-open dumping-ground notes text file on the left side of your screen and the wiki-page-specific text file on the right side.
    2. Do a "find" and look for keywords on the general notes page to quickly find all of the notes related to a specific topic.
    3. When you find something related to the wiki page which you have a text file for on the right side of your screen, cut the text from the left note file and paste it on the right file.
    4. Handle one wiki-page notes text file at a time (i.e. search for all of the notes in your general-text-file related to that page of your wiki at once); don't jump between them as that'll take longer.
  3. Move your notes from your text-files-specific-to-a-wiki-page onto the wiki itself.
    1. If I'm not sure where to put them on the wiki page, I put it in a "staging area" ("Misc ideas to file").

Nice-to-know

Editing a page

  • If you want to type out something in square brackets, type a backslash before you type the closing square bracket and Confluence will take that as a sign that you wanted an actual square bracket and not to interpret the text as a link.

How to clean up a Confluence wiki

  • It's good to periodically combine pages on your wiki so that new visitors don't click around and see a bunch of empty pages.
  • Pages which have sentences as titles are often worth getting rid of.
    • The long names make them difficult to search for, and so specific that it's likely users wouldn't mind having it combined with the likely-also-existing sibling pages with similarly-long names.
  • Having individual pages is helpful if you want to use the search bar to find that particular page.
  • Having individual pages is helpful if you want auto-updated links to that section on other pages.
  • When copying content from a page you intend to delete, you only need to click the 'Edit' button first if you're trying to copy hidden things (like 'expand' content)

Sections I need to clean up

  • business stories / biographies
  • Clean up the videogame pages.
  • Teamwork and leadership
  • Law-Fu
  • Rap
  • Dancing
  • Predicting the future
  • Reading
  • YouTube (as a skill)
  • Working (as a skill)
  • How to be Happy
  • Do something with the "My Weaknesses" section...
  • Overcoming perfectionism
  • Personal Security & "Privacy / Security"
  • Making Purchasing Decisions
  • Psych-->Dreaming & "Sleep & Dreaming"
  • Visiting the doctor
  • Your manners / behavior & "Grooming→Behavior"
  • Education
  • Homelessness
  • Either delete your service fusion coding notes or combine them all into a single page.
  • Behavior Modification should maybe go into "Areas of skill"...?
  • The top-level structure of the wiki still seems slightly confused to me. There are topics which would seem to be appropriate to both "Areas of skill" and also one of the other sections. Maybe the top-level should divide into "How" and "Should"...?

Features I should look into using more

  • Blueprints
  • Page layout - I should think about how the different layouts might be useful. I suppose the three-column layout could be helpful for kanban...
  • Tables
  • Task lists - I could see myself using this for Rhymecraft, WhatDo, and any other project I want to keep on top of.
  • Emoticons - There are actually some useful emoticons in there: a green check-mark, a red square with an 'X' in it, a blue circle with a question mark in it, a hazard sign, and different-colored stars.
  • There's a converter for Markdown that'll paste in the converted HTML.
  • Horizontal rules.
  • You can have a Trello board on a page by providing the URL.
  • Macros
    • Administration
      • Why don't I see anything in this category?
    • Communication
      • I only see the "IM Presence", which I suppose could be helpful for pages where you collaborate with a particular group of people.
    • Confluence content
      • Create from template
      • Excerpt Include
      • Include Page: Includes the contents of a page within another. <-- I could see this being very helpful for keeping stuff organized...
      • Status - Communicate the status of a project, task or milestone with visual indicators.
      • Task report - Create a report of tasks from specific locations, people, status and more.
    • Development
      • The most-interesting one I see is the Jira macro for listing relevant Jira tickets, but I'm not really using Jira right now.
    • External content
      • Activity Stream - This might be helpful for making it clear to visitors that this wiki is being actively worked on.
      • TODO: Keep going through this.
    • Formatting
      • Highlight
      • Iframe
      • Info
      • Note
      • Panel
      • Tip
      • Warning
    • Media
      • Didn't see anything particularly interesting.
    • Navigation
      • You can create an anchor.
      • Page tree search
      • Page index
      • Navigation map
      • Search results
    • Reporting:
    • Visuals and images

Features I wish Confluence had

  • I wish that the quick-suggested pages would work such that if I did a search for a term and there were no pages that matched, it would then search the H1 tags, and then the H2 tags, etc. for that term.
    • Example: when I searched "amazon associate", it returned no "quick" results, and so I had to hit "Enter" and load the full search results page to click on the "Business tools" page that contained that "amazon associate" H1 tag.
  • I wish atlassian did what Jetbrains did in having function names / class names as parts of the hierarchy and having them show up in the sidebar. With Confluence it would be the heading names that could show up in the sidebar and show up in searches.

An example structure for a company wiki

  • Employee-Specific Pages
    • John Doe
    • Jane Doe
    • ...
  • General Knowledge
    • Responsibilities ()
      • Culture (General)

      • Onboarding / learning basic company knowledge (General)

      • Recruiting (General)
      • Help achieve company goals (General Responsibility)
    • Tools ()
      • The building / office (General Tool)
      • Meetings (General Tool)
      • Screencasts (General Tool)
    • Competitors  ← Not sure where this should go...

    • Customers  ← Not sure where this should go...

    • Strategy (Company-specific)  ← Not sure where this should go...

  • Team-Specific Pages
    • Eng
      • General Knowledge (Eng)
        • Responsibilities ()
        • Tools ()
      • Team-specific pages (Eng)
        • Data Analyst Team
          • General Knowledge (DA Team)
          • Manager (DA Team)
            • Responsibilities (DA Manager)
            • Tools (DA Manager)
          • Analysts (DA Team)
            • Responsibilities (DA)
            • Tools (DA)
        • Front-end Team
          • General Knowledge
            • Responsibilities ()
            • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
        • Infrastructure Team
          • General Knowledge
            • Responsibilities ()
            • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
        • Product X Team
          • General Knowledge
            • Responsibilities ()
            • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
    • Sales
      • General Knowledge (Sales)
        • Responsibilities ()
        • Tools ()
      • Team-specific pages (Sales)
        • SDR Team
          • General Knowledge
          • Responsibilities ()
          • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
        • AE Team
          • General Knowledge
          • Responsibilities ()
          • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
        • SE Team
          • General Knowledge
          • Responsibilities ()
          • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
        • AM Team
          • General Knowledge
          • Responsibilities ()
          • Tools ()
          • Team-specific pages
Potential problems
  • One potential problem is that for a person to know where to look for how to use a particular tool, they would need to know whether a different group at the company also needs to know how to use that same tool.
    • Example:
      • I need to do a screencast. I don't know if any other group at the company needs to know how to do a screencast. So do I look in my part of the wiki or the general part of the wiki?
    • Potential solution: Keep the page at the general level, but link to it at the lower (team-specific) levels.

Installing Confluence on Digital Ocean

  1. This is how I updated the MySQL config as Atlassian's set-up guide for Confluence recommended: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/database-setup-for-mysql-128747.html

  2. I then followed these instructions: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/installing-confluence-on-linux-143556824.html

  3. To connect to Confluence after installing it I had to bypass the domain name (rhymecraft.guru) and instead connect to the actual IP of the server (209.97.149.92:8090).

  4. I needed to d/l the mysql driver from here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/database-jdbc-drivers-171742.html

Follow me on Twitter