Comments on: Which pegboard for your knowledge tools?

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:33:43 +0000

I’ve got mySQL already (not that I spend much time down there); it’s required for WordPress. (To any novices reading this: mySQL is a database my ISP provides, not something I have to do anything with.) I browsed the link quickly, and saw that Dokuwiki supports both HTML and PHP.

My PHP skills are monkey-see-monkey-do (e.g., a piece of code I pick up from the WordPress Codex), but I remember a lot more HTML than I do Wiki markup.

By: Steve Sorden

Steve Sorden — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:23:17 +0000

Just to be accurate, I read the site for the first time in a while and realized that they haven’t implemented SQLite yet, but still use plain text files (even better for accessibility).

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:49:20 +0000

Thanks, Steve. We use CTQ as shorthand around the house, both to be droll and because it became habitual for me during my time at GE–but it’s also a reminder for me to think about what’s important. I appreciate your suggestion, and I’ll give it a try.

(I took the liberty of altering your comment so that Dokuwiki’s address is a hyperlink.)

By: Steve Sorden

Steve Sorden — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:37:57 +0000

You might try Dokuwiki (http://dokuwiki.org). It's a free, open source app that I've been using several years now for the same purposes you're describing. It has a simple, but powerful syntax; it's php-based; and it uses SQLite as its database. So you just install the Dokuwiki files and it's ready to run without the hassle of a separate database. I think it meets all of the requirements you listed. I even have mine set up to force ssl on login.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:18:33 +0000

That’s not bad, Guy. What I’m particularly interested in (and maybe needlessly so) is how I might get my data OUT of some format in order to put it into another.

I ran into a small version of this when I switched ISPs for my blog. Due to a quirk of mySQL (the database underneath WordPress), certain combinations of characters and spaces (like a quote mark followed by a space) turned into foreign characters like this:
reference book.Â

There apparently isn’t an easy (or even rational) way to edit this stuff within the mySQL control tools, or to export it all, correct it in a word processor, and import it back.

That’s extreme, but I’m wondering about what happens if MediaWiki gets too weird, or I find another tool — the most stuff I have (as Carlin notes), the more I worry about the places where I keep my stuff.