Most of you won't know what a Wiki is, and even more of you probably won't ever find out.
A Wiki is, in the simplest terms, a web application for organizing documents that is usually open for editing by all. You can start here if you want to learn more about them. There are various Wikis written in everything from PHP to Ruby to PERL. After installing many Wikis over the years, I finally feel like I found one that is very nearly perfect for my personal notets. I say "nearly" because it's still sub 1.0 and has a few important features to be added.
Instiki is written in Ruby and shares the simplicity of that language. It also includes Markdown formatting which makes teaching someone how to mark-up pages a breeze.
Instiki seems to pride itself on the "there's no third step" simplicity of installation, and it's true. I was able to get it running on my Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD machines in only two steps (download, run script). I customized it further by running it through ProxyPass in Apache so I get nice clean URLs, but that's not necessary, it's just nice.
If you had considered using Wikis before, but couldn't get past the installation or the odd formatting requirements, I suggest you check out Instiki.
David McCreath
I had just started playing around with the idea of running a Wiki on my iBook to store all my Big Ideas a couple of weeks ago. After monkeying around with a few PHP and Perl variations that either wouldn't work or didn't feel right I downloaded Instiki. It took me several minutes to realize that double-clicking on the icon actually *launched Instiki itself*, not an installer. Zeroconf, indeed.
I especially like the option of using Textile or Markdown. It would be super cool is the ability to choose your markup flavor per-post. Maybe it's time to learn some Ruby ...
friday
september, 17 2004
Ianus Keller
I wanted to like Wikis too, but the big problem was not installing, but what has come to be known as "Brent's law of Wikis" http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=2526
The thing is that they all look ugly. Now I played around with Voodoopad and that was quick clean and nice, but not really a Wiki but a set of connected notes, but this Instiki really does offer a nice Wiki with a minimum of installing. And it's a great way to try out Markdown.
thursday
september, 30 2004