WikiAsFile

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories

Just a random thought. It would be so nice just to associate some file on my system as a wiki database that I could double click to launch a small project-based wiki. It takes too long to set up a new wiki, and I want a file-explorer based interface to the wikispace, not one based on URL hacking. In practice, this could be a HTML file, although a huge problem I have is that I find Apache/Perl is too slow on my Windows laptop (which is a very fast machine). Also, I want to create new spaces in a few clicks, even "copy & paste", not in a lot of rigamarole with config files, and finding the cgi-bin directory, and setting up a Shared Documents folder for All Users.

Basically the reason, I have all these client projects with all this qualitative data that I have to "memo & code" or do some other qualititative analysis. The easiest way for me to do qualitative analysis over a long period of time is to use a wiki. But I don't want to use a web application, per se. I just want something, quick, dirty, and with the file explorer semantics of a Word document.

The other advantage is that I could e-mail the database to someone else.

A really nice piece of said software would plug into a web application on a shared webspace as necessary.

I realize there is WikidPad, but I want something OpenSource so I can hack it. Mostly, I want to make InfiniteMonkey fit this in some way because I am Yet Another Wiki Developer. -- SunirShah

See also the extensive "stand alone" list on Wiki:PersonalWiki, and also WikiAsPim, WikiAsNotepad.

Looks like WxWikiServer is something for you, selfcontaing and filebased. FpWiki? seems also to your likings. The latter has higher systemrequirements but it has wysiwyg editing (IE only) which the first has not. -- JeroenRoeterd?. Update: and don't forget infocetera

A few thoughts:

For completeness: The difficulty of setting up wikis can be reduced. I preconfigure a wiki as default (on the server). Then I copy it as a whole and only adapt a few things in the config file (Sitename, Cookiename, Refererfilter). This is about 2-3 minutes of manual work, but one can automate this further. Of course this is no solution to this page.
The single file solution requires internal data structures. XML would perhaps lend itself to this task (but lets name it WML and a file using WML: file.wml). Of course this would mean single-user. But together with a wiki features wiki2wml and wml2wiki one could make a wiki transportable.
Simple operation would need a simple client, for example a dedicated statically linked WIN32 exe that could be distributed easily, perhaps as a FairSoftware project. D comes to my mind for implementation. It is OO but in the tradition of C (high performance, small footprint), OpenSource, Win32 / Linux, on the verge of getting Win32 / Linux GUI support (Wx-Widgets?). Might be a killer application.

-- HelmutLeitner

CategoryWikiTechnology

WikiAsFile

Discussion