David Kirk wrote:
On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:14:04 +1300, Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am impressed with Jim's clug wiki, after a few issues with the system
I am impressed with the ability to quickly edit things, and build up
documentation in a collaborative way.
I've been thinking of setting up a weblog in a similar way. I often
see something interesting on the web during the work day (that is not
work related) that I think "I'll have to remember to check that out
when I get home". Currently the only ways to do that are to rely on
my memory (not very reliable) or send myself an e-mail.
For private stuff, this is a problem - I sometimes send myself an email,
but more commonly save a web page or URL to my USB flash-drive, and cart
it home the (almost) old-fashioned way.
Also, sometimes I spend a bit of time researching how to do something,
and then a couple of months later I need to do it again, but I have to
do the research all over again because I have nothing to refer to.
This is where Nick's wiki idea comes in. I contemplated a wiki for my
own use, but decided to edit html directly myself instead.
The advantage of a wiki is that anyone who can drive a web-browser can
edit the content, making it ideal for public web-sites, and probably
good for Nick's intended application. I prefer to edit html, using a
combination of Nvu and VIM, so I don't need a wiki for that reason.
On a shared site, a wiki provides somewhere to store the information. I
just use my hard-drive, and back it up to CD.
A wiki uses links to navigate the information. So does my html, but I
also maintain a careful hierarchical structure on the disk. In fact, I'd
like to be freed from the tyranny of a tree structure, but I can achieve
this just as well in html as in a wiki. I can lose data (almost) as
easily in my tree structure as one could in a wiki. What I don't do,
that a wiki might provide, is add keywords to my files. I've only used
the tree structure so far, but keywords would improve my ability to view
the data in different ways.
I figure that I could set up a weblog somewhere and make it private
(because it will probably be very boring to anyone else). Then I
could just post any interesting things I find. A bit like a modern
version of the notebooks that John Vietch was talking about last year.
As long as it is easily searchable and you can categorise posts, it
could save a lot of time.
For searching, I can use grep, but I'm interested in Google Desktop
search (Windows only). Anyone know of an equivalent OSS project?
A wiki doesn't answer this any more than grep does - if the data ain't
in plain text or html, then it can't be searched by a wiki either.
Douglas.
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