Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today I am trying to set up a personal wiki to understand my own site better. Let’s get started!
Searching for a Wiki
Pick a game, show, or fandom, and chances are you will find a wiki for it — sometimes more. These online subject encyclopedias are normally open for readers to edit, and otherwise need no introduction.
I already knew there existed at least one version of the software free and open source, but Wikipedia has a whole list of them [1]. The table was static [note: only on mobile], so I had to mentally track for process of elimination across categories like open source vs proprietary or even its target audience.
My use case is to make a wiki about my sister’s fanfiction series. She’s built up her own take on the world of Sonic, and we decided it could be fun to learn how to organize elements of her story into a familiar format. If successful, the same process will make it easy for us to grow similar wikis from other stories, like when we’re worldbuilding for a possible role play game.
I landed on pursuing Foswiki [2]. It’s not limited to a single user, it’s free and open source, and it has most or all the features tracked in the comparison cited above. I did not notice at the time, but it expects you to work with Perl, a programming language of which I know little more than the name. I am open to learning, though.
Foswiki Host
For the record, I currently lack a dedicated home server I have complete control over while ButtonMash is on picture scanning duty and my fleet of Pi’s is dealing with unknown issues: either a poorly chosen brand of SD cards or one of the machines going bad. Besides, I was hoping some of you finding this post might be interested in doing this at home, so I wanted to use one of my workstations.
I landed with using DerpyChips. Even though it’s not always the most stable, it is the most readily accessible of my workstations from any point on the home network. I encountered some trouble updating though: a repository in its listings was no longer signed. It wasn’t until the next day of work that I noticed it was just a repository for Celestia, a computerized home planetarium. So far, the issue has been ignored, but it ate up a lot of the time I otherwise would have used towards the main project. In the meantime, I had reached out to three or four places, including the PopOS Matermost chat and the Celestia Discord once I identified the problem.
Apache2
A web site cannot run on bare operating system alone, apparently. There’s an extra layer called a web server. Apache Web Server is a name I’ve heard in relation to the web for a while. I gather it’s a popular choice. It was also mentioned in the installation documentation for Foswiki, and only after I installed it by repository did I notice that it’s only one of a few supported options.
Apache installed smoothly. sudo apt-get install apache2 and Firefox was able to reach the test page for Ubuntu at Derpy’s IP.
My only reservation at this point is a possible mix up between Apache and Apache2. It’s just a version difference, but I have not spotted Apache2 being called out in Foswiki’s documentation.
Takeaway
I fully hoped this would be a one and done project. Once understood and scooted the problem to the side, Foswiki appears more involved than I expected. I don’t want this to become another long-term project, so I may take another look at that list again and see if there’s something geared a little more towards a brother and sister organizing thoughts.
I find it odd that Foswiki doesn’t capitalize their W when most other wikis appear to.
Final Question
How would you use a personal wiki to organize information?
Works Cited
[1] “Comparison of Wiki Software,” Wikipedia. Accessed: June 13, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
[2] Foswiki. Accessed: June 14, 2021. [Online] Available: https://foswiki.org/