I commented in my blog a while back that I’ve been using a wiki as a brain extension, to organise my ideas and projects. Well it’s now reached 87 pages and 280 links and is really proving very useful. It sounds like I’m not the only one who’s doing this kind of thing either 😛
I’m currently using PHPWiki which is simple and functional. In the future I may upgrade to MediaWiki or one of the wiki modules for the Drupal Content Management System which I want to use for my homepage.
Recenty 37 Signals (who make the popular Basecamp project management software for the Mac) released a commercial personal wiki called Backpack. It’s essentially a wiki + to do list + image gallery + online file store but I think this could be suprisingly useful (examples). Limited features are free but you don’t get much before you have to start paying a subscription.
So I thought I’d have a quick look to see if there’s a similar project which is free and open source and I can run on my own server.
At first I failed, but found another hosted service which is possibly even better than backpack, JotSpot which is very cool. It comes with a list of ready-made “application templates” to utilize the wiki for a wide range of tasks. It has other useful features like being able to email the wiki and a WYSIWYG for the pages. But again, not something I can run on my own server.
About the closest I found was XWiki, but it only seems slightly more powerful than your average vanilla wiki out of the box. It has optional hosting, but I’m not really interested in that.
Moving wiki
As wikis all use similar but different markup and different storage structures they’re not quite compatible with each other. I think that an export as XML feature for wikis would be useful, perhaps even in DocBook format. This may already have been done, I don’t know.