Comments on: portable personal wiki

Question: portable personal wiki

corpse — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:19:24 -0800

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?

By: revgeorge

revgeorge — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:37:03 -0800

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.

By: bpt

bpt — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:38:35 -0800

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.

By: bpt

bpt — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:42:30 -0800

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.)

By: redfoxtail

redfoxtail — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 11:47:14 -0800

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.

By: corpse

corpse — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 12:46:48 -0800

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.

By: corpse

corpse — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 08:16:43 -0800

Wow, I really like Moin Moin, I think I'm going to go with it. bpt, you rock considerbly more than most.