I’ve recently picked up a renewed interest in Wikis. They’ve been on my radar screen for a long time — I can remember visiting the Portland Pattern Repository at least five years ago, and running their make your own Wiki script not long after. Unfortunately, I never found a really good use for them, mainly because I could never get anyone else at work to start using them and so the collaboration was lost. However, yesterday, I installed a Wiki (MoinMoin to be exact) for myself and am already finding it quite useful. I had been creating Web pages with notes that I wanted to keep for my own purposes, and I was maintaining them by logging into my shell account and editing them with vim. It occurred to me that I could put all those pages in a Wiki and they’d be easier to access and maintain. We’ll see if I stick with it, but I’m liking the Wiki environment for keeping track of my own stuff right now.

I was originally inspired to give Wikis another shot by this article on CGI::Kwiki at Perl.com. I installed it, but found it was not to my liking because it doesn’t recursively process the markup on each line. In other words, it processes the first piece of Wiki markup applied to a line of text, and then moves onto the next. This creates problems when you want to italicize a link or do other such things.