This subscription link activates a 33% discount for a yearly subscription in the Friends of pfblogs.org or a 20% discount for a monthly subscription. A 33% discount will bring the subscription price down to just under $50 instead of $70.

If you don’t feel like subscribing as a Friend, make sure you join the site and expose your personal finance blog for free.

And today The Finwikian: Your Two Cents on Personal Finance is born!

What is The Finwikian?

A community has grown up around personal finance blogs. As a librarian-type, I felt compelled to organize it into a useful resource. Obviously, no one site will ever capture the multiplicity of viewpoints and experiences found in the individual sites. However, I hope that this one will be valuable for bloggers and for those looking for information.

For example, each blog page links to tables of blogs—such as Personal Finance Bloggers, Tax Bloggers, or Frugality Bloggers. These tables allow you to discover other blogs with similar interests, to learn a little bit about them by visiting their Finwikian pages and then to visit the blogs themselves if you’re interested.

That makes it an excellent tool for writers and readers, you can share your blog with others, you can contribute to pages on other blogs you read, and hopefully you will discover new blogs in the process.

There will be a number of pages on various topics from Dave Ramsey and his Debt Snowball to Credit Card Arbitrage and Peer To Peer Lending. I can’t create them alone; I hope that the personal finance community will join together in making this not just one person’s site and idea, but our site full of our ideas.

Dear PF friends, if your blog isn’t on the wiki, I’m very sorry. I cataloged a bit over 100, but according to PFblogs, there are over 1000 out there. It’s pretty easy to add your blog to the wiki and the list—if you have trouble with it, let me know.

Some useful pages for getting started on the wiki are:

• The How-To Section which has information on everything from creating a new page to using formatting and templates. A lot of it is intuitive and the wiki editor is similar to a Wordpress/Blogger/E-mail editor.
• The About page.
• If you decide to become a contributer on The Finwikian or even just want to support it, you can use some of these nifty banners/badges or make your own!

This blog will have Wiki News, How-To’s, etc.

Blog Title: [http://blogtitle.com Blog Title]

Blog URL: http://blogtitle.com

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blog (or whatever that blog’s feed is)

Blogger name(s)/Alias(es):

Blog start date: If you have an archives page, use [http://blogtitle/archive/ August 4, 2004] otherwise just use August 4, 2004

About the Blog: Your description of your blog. For the entries I made, I used the blog’s own description from the About pages (if they had one) but you may be able to come up with a description better suited to The Finwikian.

Approx post frequency: multiple times daily, daily, 4-5 times weekly, 3-5 times weekly, 2-4 times weekly, weekly…it’s approximate, so it doesn’t have to be specific. If you have a specific schedule, you might want to specify something like Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Blog Categories (on this wiki): These are the current category pages for the wiki. If you come up with another idea, add it to the wiki entry on this template. [[Personal Finance Bloggers]], [[Frugal Bloggers]], [[Debt and Credit Bloggers]], [[Investing Bloggers]], [[Personal Development and Productivity Bloggers]], [[Tax Bloggers]], [[Christian Finance Bloggers]], [[P2P Lending Bloggers]], [[Muslim Finance Bloggers]], [[Real Estate Bloggers]]

Specializations: You can link to your category pages e.g. [http://yourblog.com/category/investing investing] or you can list specializations or even link to articles on your site or on the Finwikian. Pretty much whatever you want to do.

Highlights: Links to some of your best articles, some of your unique categories or series (like 33 Days to Fix Your Finances).

Memberships/Other Sites and Projects: Got another blog? Link to it! Member of a blog network? Link to the Network’s page on the site—like [[Money Blog Network]].

Of course, you don’t have to stick with this specific template. But it’s a handy way of standardizing the information that people will want to know about your blog.

The first way to find out if a new page needs to be created is to use the search bar on the Finwikian’s left sidebar to search for the page title. For instance, if you’re looking for a page on the subject Debt Snowball, search for that (you don’t need quotation marks, but you can).

The second is to click on a link on another Wiki page. For instance, the Dave Ramsey page might have the words “Debt Snowball” underlined in red. When you click through, there’s no page. If you’re writing/editing another page, you can also use the link function [[Debt Snowball]] to create a new page (or it’ll link to the existing Debt Snowball page) and click through to it from there.

If there’s already a page for it, you can edit it with any changes you feel are necessary.

But if there isn’t a page, then you’ll get this message:

There is no page titled “Debt Snowball”. You can create this page.

Click on the “create this page” link to open the Wiki Editor and make the new page.

The How To category has other posts on using the Wiki Editor and tools.

1. To create a link to a page that’s not on the Wiki, use this format [http://site.com My Awesome Site].

You start out with the [ then you put the http:// address (whatever that is, it could be something very long. You put in a space and then however many words you think you need to describe it. Then you close it with ]

2. Linking to a page in the Wiki is even easier. If the name of the page you want to link to is “Debt Snowball,” just type [[Debt Snowball]]. It’ll automatically show up as a link.

This can also be used to create a new page. If the page “Debt Snowball” doesn’t already exist, it’ll automatically be created once you put [[Debt Snowball]] on any wiki page. Then you can click through from the page you were just working on and create a new page.

3. Slightly more advanced — Suppose you want to write special text for the internal link.

For example, you might want to write “I’m snowballing my debt” and link to the debt snowball. You don’t want to have capital letters and rephrase your sentence. In order to turn “snowballing my debt” in a link to the Debt Snowball page, use this format:

I’m [[Debt Snowball|snowballing my debt]].

It’ll show up as

I’m snowballing my debt.

The special symbol there is the “pipe” which shows up as a | . It should be right above your Enter/Return Key, along with \ . Press Shift \ to get |.

The How To category has other posts on using the Wiki Editor and tools.

Or you can type in the symbols, if that suits you.

To make something bold, put three single apostrophes (”’) on each side of it. So ”’bold”’ would look like this: bold.

To italicize, you just need two single apostrophes (”) on each side. ”italic” would look like: italic.

“Ctrl b” and “Ctrl i” won’t work as short cuts in the Wiki editor.

And last, you can insert a line by simply clicking on the line icon (far right, looks like a bar). Or you can type —- to get a bar that stretches the width of the page. Headlines come with an automatic bar beneath them, so you don’t need to add one then. You may not ever need to make a page break…but it’s basically how to split up the section if you don’t want to use a headline for the new section.

Knowing these symbols might come in handy if you want to work in a document before you copy in your work.

From my experience tooling around, you need 4 sections before a contents box will appear. For 3 or less I guess it assumes that you can keep things straight. The contents box is an automatic feature.

To make a headline, simply put two equal signs and a space (= = ) on each side of the headline. = = Headline = = would be something like:

Headline

(Don’t put spaces between the “=” signs, I just had to do so to keep them from blurring together on here.)

For a complete list of personal finance bloggers click here.

Now I could have typed that, but instead I chose to create a template with the text. Here’s how I did it and how I made it show up.

I searched for the file Template:completelist. And when it didn’t come up, I chose the option of creating the page. Then, I put in the code as follows:

For a [[Personal Finance Bloggers|complete list of personal finance bloggers click here]].

I saved the page.

Then to call it at the top of each entry, I typed:

{{completelist}}

at the top. The {{}} tells the wiki that it’s a template file.

To learn the more sophisticated ways of making temples, see the MediaWiki page on template creation. I don’t want to overwhelm you here.