Personal wiki show-n-tell

June 14, 2004 2:43 PM

America! Show us your wikis! After hearing how many of you (2) are using wikis for personal content, is anybody willing to show off what they've done on their own wikis? Any cool wikis you'd link to as good examples?

I'm mostly interested in examples of how folks are using Wiki's all by themselves, but if you've got a particularly good wiki that's collective I'd love to know.

Note: No restrictions apply to nationalities of the postees. Offer encouraged where permitted. No animals were harmed in the creation of this post.

posted by daver to computers & internet (12 comments total)

A little O/T, but there was another AskMe thread about using Wiki at work for collaborating, and on someone's advice, I started using PMwiki, the easiest thing in the world for a non-techie like me. Flat file goodness! I'd link to it, but then I'd be fired. Now I want one for home too!
posted by loquax at 2:58 PM on June 14, 2004

Well, there's always the MetaFilter wiki that I started and host, which quite rapidly had a lot of useful information added to it. One of my favorite other wikis is Sensei's Library, a wiki about the game of Go. It has incredible amounts of content and a nice little app that generates diagrams of Go boards based on text input in the wiki.
posted by adrianhon at 3:08 PM on June 14, 2004

No wiki discussing is complete without Wikipedia. It's an easy link, but it's one of the best examples of the power wikis offer.
posted by cCranium at 3:23 PM on June 14, 2004

I hope it's not bad form to contribute to the answer of your own question. This turns out to be a wiki-based tour of some interesting wiki based sites.
posted by daver at 4:19 PM on June 14, 2004

Wow adrianhon, thanks for the Sensei's Library link. That looks wonderful! I get to actually play Go only rarely these days, but it's still one of my favorite things ever, and a useful model for all kinds of non-game thought. That wiki looks like a great read.
posted by freebird at 6:51 PM on June 14, 2004

Well, I wrote up my own wiki to use for my personal site at http://www.viatasso.com/ (see the C2 writeup). I don't have a whole lot of stuff up there, 'cause I usually end up spending any time I have to spare on the site working on its code rather than adding content.

But, I'm proud of its features. I think it's good pretty good editing syntax, uses clean URLs, has a well-organized recent changes, and highlights the most recent edits to a page so you can quickly see what's changed.

I tried to start keeping a diary there, but as I predicted I didn't stick with it. Having sub-directories let me organize the diary pages neatly, at least.

... Now I'm working on a true WYSIWYG wiki, a site where you can edit pages using a WYSIWYG editor instead of using the wiki's home-brewed syntax. What sets this apart from other wikis that slapped on an HtmlArea control is that clicking to edit the page doesn't take you to a new page. Instead, a toolbar pops up on the page you're viewing and you can edit it immediately. This lets you edit the page without losing your place.

I'm also planning to add full site-editing features to it, so you can view directories just as if you were using an FTP client, and could upload images, Flash files, or even PHP/Perl/whatever scripts that would coexist seamlessly alongside the "wiki" pages.

Check out my personal machine to see what I'm talking about. I think this is a pretty cool idea--the "obvious" thing to do, really. It just requires a lot of complicated JavaScript, but that's an implementation detail. :-)
posted by Khalad at 7:05 PM on June 14, 2004

khalad - your site doesn't work (title is almost completely obscured and double clicking - assuming that's what the title actually says! - doesn't do anything) on safari / osx (i'm borrowing my partner's laptop for a mo).
posted by andrew cooke at 7:50 PM on June 14, 2004

Thanks for the feedback. I forgot to mention that it only works in IE 5.5+ or Mozilla 1.3 and up at the moment, as they're the only browser's I know of that support the rich text editing control. Getting it to degrade gracefully on other browsers is on my to-do list. I should be able to get direct HTML editing working in other browsers like Safari and Opera.

Hehe, all this whispering makes this feel so clandestine.
posted by Khalad at 8:25 PM on June 14, 2004

Very cool Khalad!
posted by ajr at 8:43 PM on June 14, 2004

Well. This was so I could store all my notes for a paper I was working on in one place. Please don't change anything.
posted by Grod at 9:25 PM on June 14, 2004

Khalad That rocks. I need something like that as a way to keep in touch with a none techi who doesn't use e-mail. That would be perfect.
posted by Grod at 9:28 PM on June 14, 2004

I play this on-line game, SecondLife, what has a fairly rich built in scripting language, but the offical docs for this language were somewhat lacking and update lagged quite a bit. hence
posted by Capn at 10:17 AM on June 15, 2004