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May
20
2009

A Wiki that looks like a Blog, or a Blog that behaves like a Wiki ?

Is it your case too ? It seems that I actually need something in the middle between blog and wiki features: as soon as I had started using DokuWiki, I checked out how I could insert a blog area, and I had hardly started using a blog (DotClear for example or hosted blogs) that I wanted to insert static editable topic pages, just like wiki articles.
In the end, my ISP decided for me: PHP is so slow on Free.fr, I finally switched back to... pure HTML/CSS with absolutely no PHP, Javascript, AJAX or any other goodie. I am quite proud of the result: would you believe this is hand-made HTML ?
Of course, some might argue the editing might now become more complicated - compared to a wiki. Yes and no: with DokuWiki on Free.fr, there were several bugs:
  1. the login phase was very slow. Sometimes it was just quicker to upload the new page on the FTP server
  2. when hitting the save button, the new page would not display (blank page). I'd need to specifically re-request the page to view the new modifications
Editing HTML isn't that difficult: I have my template page and just feed in the middle. I might even write a small local script to do that. And then, upload via FTP. Huh. All of this just makes me believe some innovations are not so bright I initially thought they were. Hey, let us keep in mind there are people that wish to surf on the Internet without needing a Cray as base equipment...