In my Going Portable post, I wrote about how I’m trying to use more and more online services so that I’m not tied to any one computer. I realised this week, that I was also tied to one notebook (i.e. paper notebook) when I went ot refer to my tips’n'tricks section in the back, and reaslised that I didn’t have it with me!
This got me thinking. Whenever I need my notes, I also have Internet access and we use a Wiki at work to share information, rather than emailing documents to everyone. I needed a Wiki! 
Don’t get me wrong here, I wasn’t looking for something that I’d use to share things publically (at least not yet!) just something that was easily accessible, where I could collect all my tips’n'tricks so that I didn’t get caught out whilst at a client’s site.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wiki’s, you’ve almost certainly at least heard of Wikipedia. It’s based on an open source codebase called MediaWiki, which is freely available for anyone to implement on their own servers.
So I went ahead and downloaded it and got it up and running, with security tied up pretty tight so no-one else can access anything but the home-page (please – that’s not a challenge…!) and it’s working well! I’ve already started populating it with everything that I keep having to look up or have written down for “safe keeping” and I just wish I’d done it sooner!
I have no current plans to open my Wiki to the public (although it’s not necessarily hidden) but I may at some point in the future choose to open certain useful pages as reference. First of all though, I need to get it tidy and presentable…!
I urge you all to check out MediWiki at http://www.mediawiki.org/.
No related posts.
As fan of wiki as “second brain” and WikiZenMaster for numerous “Personal Wiki”, I agree 100% that the powerful search engine + easy editing make mediawiki a huge productivity tool in the management of your private data and stuff. You can protect it with: https, access control login and pass, a page per page group or user access control…+ each page can be only viewed and not edited.
John,
If you are doing a lot of text input and (especially) editing existing pages in your wiki, you should check out the Firefox extension “It’s All Text”. When you install this, it puts a small “edit” button at the bottom of any editable text box in a web page. Click on it and it launches your favorite text editor with the contents of the box. Edit away, and when you save the new text is automatically uploaded to the page. Much better than fooling around with cut & paste and arrow keys.
Hi Bill,
That’s good to know – thanks!
Regards,
-John.