portable personal wiki

October 12, 2005 11:19 AM

I would like to reconsider my options for a personal wiki.

I had been using a modified version of TiddlyWiki, but I'm keeping A LOT of information in there, so I'm worried about stablity and performance. Here's what I need:

1) The ability to store it on a thumb drive
2) It needs to work on both a PC and a Mac
3) It needs to be able to scale well
4) Doesn't need to be a single file, but I'd like to not have to keep information in a DB that isn't portable.

Ideas?

posted by corpse to computers & internet (6 comments total)

Scale well? How many thousands of hits/sec is your personal wiki going to be getting?

You might want to look into putting the Mac and Windows executable versions of Instiki onto a thumbdrive and then configuring them to use the same storage directory.
posted by revgeorge at 11:37 AM on October 12, 2005

Perhaps you could use a web-based wiki that uses flat-file storage like Oddmuse. If you also put small HTTP servers for the platforms you use on the drive, plus a couple of platform-specific scripts to launch the server on some random port and open a web browser to the RecentChanges page, then you have a reasonably simple cross-platform solution.

Actually, Instiki might be even easier, since it's a single executable for the wiki and the web server, so the set-up work is more or less already done for you. I think it uses flat files for storage. "Ruby in Your Sock" mentions this possibility. I don't see why it wouldn't work.
posted by bpt at 11:38 AM on October 12, 2005

If you prefer MoinMoin to Instiki, MoinMoin Desktop Edition is also an option. There is a self-contained EXE version for Windows. (The *nix version isn't self-contained, but then Python is usually installed already on *nices.)
posted by bpt at 11:42 AM on October 12, 2005

Not scaling well in terms of just handling lots of data (rather than lots of hits) is an issue for TiddlyWiki, revgeorge, so I expect that's what corpse has in mind.
posted by redfoxtail at 11:47 AM on October 12, 2005

Thank you, I may go back to instiki, I've used it before and it seems a lot more stable than a lot of whizzy things flying around.

Also the moin moin moin one, thanks.
posted by corpse at 12:46 PM on October 12, 2005

Wow, I really like Moin Moin, I think I'm going to go with it. bpt, you rock considerbly more than most.
posted by corpse at 8:16 AM on October 13, 2005