I’ve been having a blast playing with the features of PmWiki. It is no exaggeration to say that Wikis are what all the hype about the personal web was once about. To hell with trying to code raw HTML. Away with bloat-heavy editors like FrontPage. And, for a lot of stuff, enough with trying to make blogging tools act as web site managers.
It’s the latter that has come as the biggest shock. I’ve been using MovableType as my web site manager of choice for the last year or more. And it’s done okay for that, but, in reality, a lot of the stuff I want to do with it — game sites come to mind, but there are others, too — can be done more easily via a Wiki. Which is why I’m seriously looking at moving some of the nine blogs I have here into a Wiki format, and use MT for — well, for stuff that is serial/journal oriented, which is its (unmatched) strength.
(That doesn’t mean this blog is going anywhere. As a journaling tool, blogging is where it’s at, and I have no intention of changing ***Dave Does the Blog into anything else. It’s more some of the other blogs that I have. Actually, to be fair, three or four of those blogs should probably just go away anyway, being dead and stuffed. But there’s at least one, and goodly portions of another, that would be better served on a Wiki. Doyce seems to feel much the same.)
I need to learn more about page formats/templates/CSS/skins in Wiki — though it looks like PmWiki handles such things with relative ease — but I just wanted to drop a note that if you maintain a lot of static or non-serial info online, you owe it to yourself to check out the world of Wiki — even if you aren’t interested in the tremendous collaborative power that Wikis provide.
There are only a few things I want from a wiki that I haven’t found yet:
Packaged Comment-code, for folks who want to ask a question or make a suggestion without actually learning how wiki works. I’ve hacked this in ugly fashion on FireflyWiki, but as I said… it’s a hack.
Other than that, you’re right: I can see a huge amount of my online static stuff moving into a wiki’d collection of stuff. One of the reasons I tried to move over a bunch of game-stuff all at once at Random Encounters is so that I would have a number of Groups already ‘filled in’ a bit with different kinds of material, so I could figure out the group templates in something like a ‘live’ environment.
Yeah. That’s why I’m going to start off with the IDC and ViD stuff so I can learn those aspects of it with that material, before moving the rest of the potential content over.
It actually occurs to me that I could move WIST over there, too, but I need to chat with you about the whole domain-within-a-domain thang.