This DocuWiki-driven web site is an online repository of things I write. After installing a wiki at home, I was increasingly impressed by the wiki concept and the possibilities it opens. Writing on the computer becomes so much easier if you are liberated from the constraints of software that is designed to ultimately commit text to paper, or to write code better entrusted to a text editor. Wikis are not only an interesting tool for collaboration, but also, for me, the electronic equivalent and replacement for the good old stack of notebooks and bunch of pens.
I also run a blog, serendipity.
Locally, ie on my home computer, I don’t use DokuWiki, but the very nice Instiki instead. It has a lot of nice feature – a choice between Textile and Markdown as a text input interface, html and pdf export, and an inbuilt web server. Instiki is written in Ruby, however, so it is not as easy to set up on a hosted account as a tool written in PHP, Python or Perl if you lack control over which programming languages are installed. But DokuWiki looks like an excellent wiki engine, too. It has an active community site, and apparently good support. The only problem: Out of the box, it is not made for producing Unicode (utf-8) pages. So I tried to change the configuration. Let’s hope it works.
Oh, and about the name of this site … just in case you wonder what a palimpsest is. OK?