RandyKramer

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I guess this is me ;-)

I want to see how Meatball / Usemod remembers me—must I remember my user number every time I edit (which I've already lost (not recorded)), or, does Usemod use cookies?

I'm "visiting" the discussions on wiki markup and parsing, as I'm thinking about writing a TWiki-like thing in Ruby.

_I'm not sure I can fully "defend" my choice of Ruby—I gave up on learning Perl at least partly because of the TIMTOWTDI philosophy, spent some time looking at Python, which seemed nice enough (the required indentation did not bother me (it worried me a little, with the possibility of easy corruption)—if anything, the immutable strings worried me the most. Others often said things to the effect that if I liked Python, I'd like Ruby better. So far, I do like Ruby, but it embodies the same TIMTOWTDI philosophy that helped chase me away from Perl. Plus, there seem to be a lot of complaints / discussions on the Ruby mailing list about changing syntax— just what I need._

"My" TWiki-like thing would have a little different scope than most wikis, my emphasis is on making offline creation / editing / publishing pages very easy, even in the presence of collaborators, thus also addressing things like mirroring and backup. Also I'd like something faster than TWiki, and think I am willing to (almost) require cookies (or at least, make some things easier for those willing/able to accept cookies). I might end up (or especially, start out) using the existing TWiki as the "back end" to my thing.

If anybody is interested in helping, let me know. I haven't decided on the licensing approach yet—I need to make a living at something and would prefer to do it in programming (/ system design). I know you can make money with open source / GPL stuff (I lurk on mailing lists like fsb). If I find some interested participants, I'd like to choose the license based on a consensus of those participating (at the appropriate point in time--we don't have to declare our open source intentions during design or really until we are close to our first code release).

Also, I will be tied up with some other things for the next few weeks, so will have minimal time for this.

Please check out Instiki (a wiki in ruby) before writing Yet Another Wiki codebase. Twiki probably has more features, but there's no way on earth you're going to want to use it as a "backend" unless you're aiming for database compatibility. I'm interested in the distributed aspect of a wiki, and would like to see a wiki that used a distributed SCM like Darcs or Arch to let anyone mirror, add to, and even fork an existing wiki's content. --ChuckAdams

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