Kate's Blog

You CAN take it with you - off-line access to a wiki

Wiki technology is a tool my workgroup has adopted enthusiastically. Sun has a number of wikis used internally by technical (and not-so-technical) staff to share documentation, best practices, etc. We use mediawiki, the software used by wikipedia, "the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet", as they say.

It is far easier to use wiki to update documentation than edit a file when you have many people authoring content. But let's face it, there are times when you just can't be on-line to edit your pages (I'll worry about printing another day...). I wanted a way to be able to take my pages with me, create new pages, and edit without needing internet connectivity. Export to HTML is good for reading, but I wanted to edit.

Fortunately, I found some help at the mediawiki site. What I did was to download mediawiki, and install MAMP. MAMP is a "Macintosh, Apache, Mysql, and PHP" bundle (for Macs, obviously - there are similar packages available for Solaris, Linux and Windows, but a Mac is what I use every day, so that's where I needed to run it). The instructions for configuring the database were a little opaque, but a few tweaks had it working (the trick was to use MySQL running from MAMP to create the database user and database, rather than doing so from the mediawiki installer).

Copying pages between wikis is still a manual cut'n'paste task - I would like an easier way to do this without mirroring the entire wiki to my laptop. But for now, I create a link to the page I want to edit from the main wiki page on my laptop. In one browser window I edit the page I want to copy, select all the source text, and in the second browser window, I paste the source into the wiki on my laptop. Generally I only need a few pages, so this isn't too bad. Of course I have to reverse the process to put my changes back, including any new pages I create.

In summary, it's a bit of a hack, and it'd be better if it could merge changes and do the import and export automatically, but it gets the job done for now.

Technorati tags: wiki

Posted at 03:04PM 15 Nov, 2006 by Kate Morris in Sun  |