A while ago I migrated from a traditional hosting service to GitHub. One thing I lost in the process was access to a mediawiki installation for a personal Wiki. I like Wikis, and I've missed it ever since.
That is, until I finally looked a little closer at GitHub and saw that they support Wikis! DOH! So now I'm experimenting with it and so far I like it (still very early days). Each Wiki is stored in its own git repo and can be cloned and worked on off-line.
One problem is that they haven't integrated the Wiki repos with the general GitHub software very well, so the GitHub Desktop GUI application can't deal with it. The doc says it does, but the doc lies. You have to use command-line git.
But that's not a big problem. One of the reasons I like Wikis is a low-barrier to updating. And having to edit files, write them out, and then do the git commands to update is *not* low-barrier. So my usage will be almost exclusively via the web.
But it's nice to know that if my Wiki grows large, I can run sed scripts on the files to make global changes if I want.
Anyway, THANKS GitHub!
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Goodby my Wiki
This post is a little late in coming as I made the change earlier this year.
I used to use a hosting service, suso.com, for my main website and email. It ran a message board I built using Perl, and it also ran a older version of wikimedia for a personal wiki. But the service cost a fair amount, and neither the message board nor the wiki was being used much. So to save money, I cancelled it and moved the content to github.
The content is still available at geeky-boy.com, but I dumped the wiki pages to a flat directory. If I want to edit them, I need to edit the raw HTML.
I somewhat mourn the loss of my wiki. I like wikis for certain kinds of content. It is especially powerful for collaborative efforts, particularly for geographically-separated teams. But even for single-user personal-use, it presents such a low barrier to use. If I want to update a page, it's just a few button clicks away. And the update process is easy (assuming minimal use of fancy wiki markup). And it's easy to see change history, roll back changes, etc.
Contrast this with web pages on github where you have to edit them locally in HTML, check in the changes, and sync with "gh-pages" branch to make them live. It takes longer, and requires specialized software. E.g. I can't easily do it from a phone or tablet.
There are "free" wikis out there, but I don't like the ads, and most of them use non-wikimedia software; the few I've tried I haven't liked.
Maybe someday I will try some kind of third-party content management system. Or maybe I'll write my own wiki software as a fun personal project (maybe do the rendering of the markup in the browser in Javascript). Or maybe I just don't really need a wiki. Long ago, I imagined that the blog and the wiki would compliment each other, with content in each referring to content in the other. Blog for "news", wiki for "content". But it hasn't worked out that way.
So rest-in-peace wiki.geeky-boy.com. You were fun while you lasted.
I used to use a hosting service, suso.com, for my main website and email. It ran a message board I built using Perl, and it also ran a older version of wikimedia for a personal wiki. But the service cost a fair amount, and neither the message board nor the wiki was being used much. So to save money, I cancelled it and moved the content to github.
The content is still available at geeky-boy.com, but I dumped the wiki pages to a flat directory. If I want to edit them, I need to edit the raw HTML.
I somewhat mourn the loss of my wiki. I like wikis for certain kinds of content. It is especially powerful for collaborative efforts, particularly for geographically-separated teams. But even for single-user personal-use, it presents such a low barrier to use. If I want to update a page, it's just a few button clicks away. And the update process is easy (assuming minimal use of fancy wiki markup). And it's easy to see change history, roll back changes, etc.
Contrast this with web pages on github where you have to edit them locally in HTML, check in the changes, and sync with "gh-pages" branch to make them live. It takes longer, and requires specialized software. E.g. I can't easily do it from a phone or tablet.
There are "free" wikis out there, but I don't like the ads, and most of them use non-wikimedia software; the few I've tried I haven't liked.
Maybe someday I will try some kind of third-party content management system. Or maybe I'll write my own wiki software as a fun personal project (maybe do the rendering of the markup in the browser in Javascript). Or maybe I just don't really need a wiki. Long ago, I imagined that the blog and the wiki would compliment each other, with content in each referring to content in the other. Blog for "news", wiki for "content". But it hasn't worked out that way.
So rest-in-peace wiki.geeky-boy.com. You were fun while you lasted.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Blog tags
Tags are used to group posts. If you want to see all of my postings related to, say, "death", just click on the "death" tag and you'll see the list.
I like tags. It is better than a hierarchical system of organization since a particular item may be associated with multiple points in the hierarchy. E.g. I might have a post tagged as "coding" and "rants", if I have a rant about some aspect of coding.
[Aside - email clients traditionally use a hierarchical folders. But gmail (at least the web interface) gives you true tagging. I like that, but ironically don't use it.]
One complication of tags as an organizational model is that the tags themselves must be organized, especially if the number of tags gets large. THAT strikes me as something which could be organize into a hierarchy. I might have a rants tag and a technical tag. The technical tag might be sub-divided into science and software. Software might be further subdivided into coding and debugging. My rant about coding would show up in both the "rants" tag and the "coding" tag.
Alas, this blogging system does not allow for organizing tags hierarchically ... at least not that I know of. It gives you two views:
The "tag cloud" is interesting. It uses different font sizes for the tags, depending on the relative number of postings given that tag. So rants might be big because I do a lot of ranting, while science might be small because I don't do much blogging about general science. The tag cloud gives an interesting view into my head even without clicking on any of them since they suggest which topics I feel passionate about (or at least chatty about).
That said, I'm thinking it is more of a novelty than a useful organizational model. (It's a novelty that I like, which is why I enabled it on this blog. But it will suffer from the same unwieldiness if I create a lot of tags.) For large numbers of tags, I'm still leaning towards hierarchical.
Since blogger doesn't support hierarchical, I guess I'll just muddle along for now. If my number of tags gets unwieldy, I can look at maybe leveraging the alphabetizing model to represent the hierarchy. For example:
rants
technical
technical-science
technical-software
technical-software-coding
I don't like that much, partly because the important part of the tag name becomes the last part, whereas the eye is drawn to the first part, obscuring the intent. Also, what if I want rants to be last? I guess I could do this instead:
01-technical
02---software
03-----coding
04---science
05-rants
That lets me order them any way I want to. But wow, what a pain if I want to insert a new tag, like say, software design. I'll have to renumber all the tags below it. I guess I could do the old BASIC trick of numbering them by 10s... (Who me? Program in BASIC? How old do you think I am, anyway?)
Another thought: assuming that each tag is simply a fixed URL, I could create a wiki page of the tag links and organize them any way I want to. I could then simply have a pointer to that page on the blog.
Ah well, enough thinking about this. Like I said, I'll just leave it a hodge-podge for now.
I like tags. It is better than a hierarchical system of organization since a particular item may be associated with multiple points in the hierarchy. E.g. I might have a post tagged as "coding" and "rants", if I have a rant about some aspect of coding.
[Aside - email clients traditionally use a hierarchical folders. But gmail (at least the web interface) gives you true tagging. I like that, but ironically don't use it.]
One complication of tags as an organizational model is that the tags themselves must be organized, especially if the number of tags gets large. THAT strikes me as something which could be organize into a hierarchy. I might have a rants tag and a technical tag. The technical tag might be sub-divided into science and software. Software might be further subdivided into coding and debugging. My rant about coding would show up in both the "rants" tag and the "coding" tag.
Alas, this blogging system does not allow for organizing tags hierarchically ... at least not that I know of. It gives you two views:
- Alphabetical
- Tag cloud
The "tag cloud" is interesting. It uses different font sizes for the tags, depending on the relative number of postings given that tag. So rants might be big because I do a lot of ranting, while science might be small because I don't do much blogging about general science. The tag cloud gives an interesting view into my head even without clicking on any of them since they suggest which topics I feel passionate about (or at least chatty about).
That said, I'm thinking it is more of a novelty than a useful organizational model. (It's a novelty that I like, which is why I enabled it on this blog. But it will suffer from the same unwieldiness if I create a lot of tags.) For large numbers of tags, I'm still leaning towards hierarchical.
Since blogger doesn't support hierarchical, I guess I'll just muddle along for now. If my number of tags gets unwieldy, I can look at maybe leveraging the alphabetizing model to represent the hierarchy. For example:
rants
technical
technical-science
technical-software
technical-software-coding
I don't like that much, partly because the important part of the tag name becomes the last part, whereas the eye is drawn to the first part, obscuring the intent. Also, what if I want rants to be last? I guess I could do this instead:
01-technical
02---software
03-----coding
04---science
05-rants
That lets me order them any way I want to. But wow, what a pain if I want to insert a new tag, like say, software design. I'll have to renumber all the tags below it. I guess I could do the old BASIC trick of numbering them by 10s... (Who me? Program in BASIC? How old do you think I am, anyway?)
Another thought: assuming that each tag is simply a fixed URL, I could create a wiki page of the tag links and organize them any way I want to. I could then simply have a pointer to that page on the blog.
Ah well, enough thinking about this. Like I said, I'll just leave it a hodge-podge for now.
Content Publishing
I created a page where I am basically talking to myself about the various ways that content can be published on the Internet, and which way(s) I might want to concentrate on. It is of minimal interest to anybody else.
http://www.geeky-boy.com/w/Sford_Content_Outlets.html
At present, I'm a minimal publisher, splitting content between my wiki and my blog. New Wiki content is sometimes announced in the blog - like this very post. (I also have a twitter and facebook accounts which I don't use due to low signal-to-noise ratios.)
http://www.geeky-boy.com/w/Sford_Content_Outlets.html
At present, I'm a minimal publisher, splitting content between my wiki and my blog. New Wiki content is sometimes announced in the blog - like this very post. (I also have a twitter and facebook accounts which I don't use due to low signal-to-noise ratios.)
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
What's this Blog for?
I don't know. At this point, it's for playing around and experimenting. I don't have the time or energy to post often enough to support a general audience, so I don't see myself becoming a "blogger" any time soon. But I may contribute technical content to a corporate blog and might want to post occasional non-corporate stuff related to my corporate postings. This is pure speculation, of course; chances are that this blog will die a quiet death of neglect.
Update (21-Jan-2013): I guess this is becoming what many blogs are - a hodge-podge of whatever I feel compelled to write about at the time.
That raises a question - from the time of its creation (Aug-2007) till very recently, the blog was door-nail dead. Did I not feel compelled to write during the past 12 years? The answer is yes, I have felt the impulse to write stuff all along. But I didn't have time to do anything so frivolous as blogging. I still don't have time to blog, but at this point in my life I figure I can get away with making more time to do frivolous things.
UPDATE (12-Jun-2014): Wow! 2014 is not yet even half done, and I've already produced more posts than the previous 7 years combined!
I see from stats that my page views is going up, but is still trivial compared to "popular" blogs. But that doesn't bother me much. In fact, the only thing that bothers me a little is the thought that I'm giving a lecture to an auditorium full of empty seats -- that's rather embarrassing. Fortunately, neither I nor anybody else has any way of proving that I'm talking to myself, and at my age embarrassment is the least of my worries. I enjoy posting, and as pointless hobbies go, this one is sure cheap. :-)
Update (21-Jan-2013): I guess this is becoming what many blogs are - a hodge-podge of whatever I feel compelled to write about at the time.
That raises a question - from the time of its creation (Aug-2007) till very recently, the blog was door-nail dead. Did I not feel compelled to write during the past 12 years? The answer is yes, I have felt the impulse to write stuff all along. But I didn't have time to do anything so frivolous as blogging. I still don't have time to blog, but at this point in my life I figure I can get away with making more time to do frivolous things.
UPDATE (12-Jun-2014): Wow! 2014 is not yet even half done, and I've already produced more posts than the previous 7 years combined!
I see from stats that my page views is going up, but is still trivial compared to "popular" blogs. But that doesn't bother me much. In fact, the only thing that bothers me a little is the thought that I'm giving a lecture to an auditorium full of empty seats -- that's rather embarrassing. Fortunately, neither I nor anybody else has any way of proving that I'm talking to myself, and at my age embarrassment is the least of my worries. I enjoy posting, and as pointless hobbies go, this one is sure cheap. :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
