PersonalWiki
Article contributed again by GilbertHerschberger (12 June 2001).
Introduction
Great book! I read it with great anticipation. I have been using
JOS Wiki for about three years and love it. I
used the "ancient" JOS Wiki on www.jos.org, the "old"
JOS Wiki on www.metamech.com and the "new"
JOS Wiki on wiki.jos.org. I tried QuickiWiki
outside a webserver for a couple of days before installing
it on my Apache server on a GNU/Linux box. I tried it and like it a lot
as a personal information manager.
The Wiki Way is a new book by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham, published
by Addison-Wesley. It is a good book. I'm looking forward to its second edition.
I recommend this book for
- anyone thinking of setting up their own wiki,
- anyone who is or wants to become a wiki author (wikizen), and
- anyone thinking of developing their own wiki software (a wiki clone).
This book illustrates its discussion with QuickiWiki software. This software
was written by the original wiki developer, Ward Cunningham. It enables you
to use wiki as your own personal information manager. With a Perl-based
implementation, you can set up your own wiki. That's what I did.
For a wiki author, this book provides a reference of wiki markup. It also
describes in simple language what is going on behind the scenes.
For a developer, this book is an excellent reference on how to customize
an existing wiki or build your own. It has practical examples for
implementing wiki markup. As an experience HTML author, I prefer
a mix of wiki and HTML markup. This book discusses the issue of
allowing HTML markup and how to mix it properly. It offers advice on
securing your wiki database, too.
Official web site
The book has its own website:
- http://www.wiki.org/
- First edition problems with the CD-ROM in post-production make it necessary for Microsoft Windows 9x users to download files from the website. The files on CD-ROM are un-usable for Windows 9x.
About the JOS Wiki
The JOS Project is correctly characterized as
building a free and open Java-based operating system
. Our own "old" JOS Wiki is mentioned at
least twice.
- Unfortunately, it mistakenly says that this software was written in the Java programming language, instead of Perl. None of these wiki clones were written in the Java programming language. Others have written wiki clones using the Java programming language. Using this book as a specification, I am writing one now called PersonalWiki.
The very important Preview feature was nowhere to be found. Our own
JOS Wiki software offered this feature for more than two years. This
feature is important for new wiki authors. It enables an author to see how an
article will be rendered before posting it to the database for others to
see. This encourages contribution from those who have never before used wiki
markup.
- Since the final draft of the book was submitted for publication in November 2000, no mention of sfWiki software is understandable. At that time, we were using the "old" JOS Wiki at
www.metamech.com.
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