Why not try a personal Wiki for some of your more amorphous notes?

In my evenings, I sometimes find myself performing the role of “Resident Geek” at my nephew’s school, tending to network issues, computer problems, and my favorite, “The Internet is down!”

Over the past couple of years I have considered several different approaches for keeping a grip on which computers had which service patch, which router is getting flaky, and which cable connects the library to the classroom at the end of the hall.

I have tried Excel spreadsheets, an Access database, even a spiral-bound notebook—none of them made the job any easier. A few weeks ago I thought about trying a Wiki and this has turned out to be a perfect fit!

If you are looking to keep a loose scrapbook of notes with lots of arbitrary categories and relationships between them, a wiki might do the trick. In this article I’ll cover two simple freeware wikis you can carry around on a thumb drive.

What’s in a Wiki?

All of us have used Wikipedia at one time or another, and though it may be regarded with disdain by high school teachers, when you consider how it works, Wikipedia is an amazing achievement. But what is the nature of a wiki?

One of the key features is that any page can be easily edited at any time (of course this can be limited by permissions). Another attribute is the ability to breathe life into a new page just by calling its name.

Between these two features, you get the essence of wiki-ness.

For example, if I have a page that discusses North American bears, I can type in a list of bears in a special format, often in jammed-together Wiki Words, like this:

• GrizzleyBear
• BlackBear
• BrownBear

As soon as I save the page, those bear names become hyperlinks. Even though I haven’t written any pages about the individual bears, whenever it finally suits me, I can click on BlackBear and accept the invitation to “Create a new page called BlackBear”

Better still, a friend who knows about black bears might click on BlackBear and write a beautiful page about the animals.

That’s what wikis are all about.

Back to the School Computers

In a matter of minutes I was able to make a page that described the building and listed the various rooms in the building. I was able to then click on each room and “auto-vivify” a page for the room.

From that point, it was easy to create custom pages for each computer in the building, with each page listing the machine’s stats. I also created pages for each network switch or router.

In a matter of two or three evenings I had the skeleton of a solid knowledge base populated—it’s a pretty fancy looking web site with dozens of pages that took little effort to put together.

Last night I noticed that one of the machines wasn’t connecting to the Internet, though it connects fine to internal servers. I popped open its page on the wiki and added a simple note at the bottom of the page:

2009-10-11 - This machine isn't able to connect to the Internet. Not sure why. It connects fine to internal servers.

A few weeks ago I replaced a fan in a network switch. An easy annotation on the wiki page for that device.

Personal Wikis

There are many uses for personal wikis, mostly centered around personal knowledge management and personal information management. People use wikis as a replacement for time and task management tools, as a place for gathering thoughts, as a sort of amorphous database, and many other things.

There are many different personal wikis available—here’s a short list of free ones. One nice simple wiki to try is TiddlyWiki. If you are looking for something with a bit more substance, you can try a portable version of MediaWiki—the engine behind Wikipedia—that runs off your thumb drive.

TiddlyWiki

This afternoon I downloaded the flyweight portable wiki called TiddlyWiki. This is an amazingly tight little application—it comes in the form of a single fat web page that you copy to your thumb drive. As you make edits to your TiddlyWiki, the single html page is saved with your changes. Since it’s a single fancy file, backups are dead easy.

Here’s what it looks like when you first launch the “empty.html” file:

After a half hour of twiddling around, I had thrown together this basic set of “Tiddlers”

In this screen shot you can see that there are now links that bring up custom “Tiddlers” for each computer and for each room. I have opened one of the little pages for Computer21.

They describe these pages as being comparable to note cards. All in all, it is tight and easy to use.

Want to give it a try? Download it from the TiddlyWiki site. You really need to play with it to get a feel for what it can do!

MediaWiki

If you are looking for something with a little more meat on it, you can run the Wikipedia engine on your USB drive.

The easiest way to set this up is to let MoWeS do everything for you. MoWeS stands for Modular Webserver System. It’s a free product that you can configure as a self-contained Apache web server with a variety of cool apps like MediaWiki, running off a thumb drive.

Here’s how to set up MediaWiki in five minutes:

• Go to the MoWeS Mixer
• The first time around choose “I do not have a MoWeS Portable II Package and want to obtain a new package” when prompted and click Go.
• On the software lists, check Apache2, MySQL5, PHP5, and MediaWiki
• Click Download Now
• At this point they ask you some kind of question in German, to filter spambots, but it seems to be a simple math problem. Fill in the answer and click Submit Query
  (“Zum Schutz vor Downloadrobotern geben Sie bitte das Ergebnis dieser Aufgabe ein: 5 + 8 = ?“)
• Unzip the downloaded zip file, mowes_portable.zip, and copy the files to your USB drive
• Open your thumb drive and double-click mowes.exe
• Select your language and accept the license
• Click install, and confirm when prompted

The installation process may take several minutes, but rest assured that it isn’t installing anything on your computer.

Note: I received two or three firewall warnings for the Apache web server and the MySQL database. I had to click the “Unblock” button for all of them before my new MediaWiki-on-a-stick would work correctly.

After all of the dust settled, I have this little window on my screen:

In order to shut down and close out, just click the End button.

Once your MediaWiki USB key is running, you can go to this web page:

http://127.0.0.1/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page

It looks just like Wikipedia, doesn’t it?

What a truly amazing thing: you can carry around your own Wikipedia server on a USB key and plug it in any random machine and start it up.

Different Wiki Features

As you try out different wiki software, you will notice that there are plenty of differences in the features they support:

• Each wiki has a different kind of editor. Some are visual; others are simple text editors.
• The markup syntax you use for pages is different from wiki to wiki.
• Most wikis support features such as “category pages” that find all pages tagged with a category.
• Some support adding images and other content; others don’t. I imagine that TiddlyWiki probably has some means of embedding images, but I couldn’t find it.
• A quick glance at the MediaWiki screenshot above shows extended features such as the Discussion tab and the History tab.
• Some use the filesystem for their pages; others use a database.

Since I wanted a central wiki for the whole school, I chose a different product from the portable wikis I discussed here—I decided to run MoinMoin on a Ubuntu installation on an aging Gateway desktop machine. Nevertheless, the basic idea is still the same.

Once that arrangement becomes a little more stable I’ll write up a howto document, like the Linux NAS one from a few months back.

Other Sources

There are loads of different personal wiki options out there and many people have written how-to documents and tutorials. Here’s a few:

• Run Your Personal Wikipedia from a USB Stick (Lifehacker.com)
• Geek to Live: Set up your personal Wikipedia (Lifehacker.com)
• Wiki On A Stick (PmWiki.org)
• Getting Started with Wiki on a Stick (About.com)
• TiddlyWiki for the rest of us (giffmex)