[Glastonbury] more wiki

[Martin Wheeler]

On Fri, 10 Dec 2004, tim hall wrote:

> What about:
> http://instiki.org

Tim __

Thanks very much for the heads-up on instiki.

I've been getting rather discouraged with wikis lately; mainly because of 
the difficulty of indexing large collections of documents; keeping track 
of information; trying to find orphaned pages within the wiki; etc.
Plus, I'm tending to work more on single, linearly sequential large 
documents these days; and wikis are great for *collecting* (and sometimes 
ordering) disparate clumps of information; but not very good as a tool for 
assembling them.

So I've rather gone off the idea of using wikis.

Now: enter instiki.

I'm quite impressed with the visual interface (yes, I could dive into the 
bowels of the code of any other wiki and probably produce something like 
the same result; but then I'd have a non-standard product that I couldn't 
upgrade, etc.).  So from the start, instiki *looks* right for me.

Next, I notice you can *export* pages from it directly without having to 
faff around with other bits of software -- a plus point.  (If only it did 
XML directly, though.  Still, I can take the TeX output and shove it 
through a filter.  Haven't yet sussed how to get PDF working properly, 
either.)

But the great thing for me is the 'All Pages' listing -- great!Getting 
other wikis to do that is a PITA -- /when/ it can be done.
And you can *automatically* pull out all orphaned pages.  (Now that really 
is neat. I think I've got a use for this right now.)

In fact, I was so impressed I installed it straight away on the startext 
demo server alongside all the others, so you can go and play with it (use 
the usual ID & pass) as much as you like:

      http://startext.demon.co.uk:2500/

======================================

If you're interested in what I had to do to get it working under Debian 
testing, this is what I did:

1) change the first line of the install script (instiki.rb) to relect 
where ruby lives under debian:

-  #!/usr/bin/ruby

2) make the install script executable ('chmod 755 instiki.rb')

3) I actually installed it in /usr/share/<appname>, NOT under the html 
docroot, for security reasons -- without any apparent problems

4) because it requires most of ruby's standard libraries, and I don't 
think I've got anything else running under ruby (have I?) I had to 
install the extra libraries it assumes are available:

- apt-get install rdoc
                   libwebrick-ruby1.8
                   libzlib-rub1.8
                   libstrscan-ruby1.8

should be enough to pull in all the other dependencies needed.

And away you go. It installs without problem.

(Anyone feel like packaging it for Debian?  Andy -- would you 'offically' 
check that the licence is indeed suitable?)

Cheers,
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
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