The Wiki that became a Blog
I've started collecting knowledge for myself (and for everyone to see) in a DokuWiki back in 2008. In 2014 I found DokuWiki to start feeling dated and explored alternatives. I liked the idea of having all entries as single files and in a standard markup format (compared to DokuWiki's own markup language), so I started to move all entries to GitHub Pages and in early 2015 my Jekyll-based GitHub-hosted Wiki went online. While this was a great exercise and works really well, it wasn't ideal. The site being created by a static-site generator means you can only use JavaScript for dynamic things. I had to use Disqus for comments and Google Site Search to allow searching the site. Also, it being based on static text files meant I had to manually track e.g. timestamps of when an article was created or updated by adding (and updating) the times in the Markdown-file's Front Matter. And creating a new entry meant to checkout everything from GitHub, add a textfile in the correct directory, make sure the Front Matter contains all necessary data, commit the changes into the Git repository and push everything back to GitHub. Then find out there's a typo, change file, create commit, push again. And it all depended on GitHub willing to host the page. So I wanted to switch to a different system, but wasn't sure yet which.
Continue reading "The Wiki that became a Blog"