Tag Archive for 'wiki'

Wiki-riffic

Published
by
jk
on September 25, 2008
in Mac Applications and Web Applications
. Comments

Rather than go and pay for something as huge and as feature-laden as Confluence, I’ve decided to go the open source and free route.

I ended up using MediaWiki for HanMeta, but I’m not fully satisfied. Lacking in AJAX and using Dreamhost to host this wiki really doesn’t make it too responsive. I am however, enjoying relearning the insanity that is MediaWiki markup (Wikipedia uses this).

TiddlyWiki is an amazing feat of ridiculous JavaScripting, but seems to be missing some features… one of which is extremely important to me: history. I feel like a wiki isn’t without this feature.

Anyone know of any desktop Mac applications that does change history? I looked at VoodooPad, but that doesn’t seem to have that feature.

Seriously, anything that’s stable and exportable will be awesome, be it online or off. Change history is huge for me, because, as always, I need to know and be prepared for everything.

Assembla: “Backpack” for Software Engineering and FREE

Published
by
jk
on January 9, 2008
in HanMeta and Web Applications
. Comments

I’ve found myself need a full toolkit for software development as I move forward with HanMeta. This list includes goodies like:

  • Wiki/Documentation
  • Bug Tracking
  • Source Code Management
  • Chat/Communication Tool
  • AND something to put all of this together.

Assembla has been working well. It’s kinda like basecamp for software developers. The application just screams Rails and lickability.

I have a couple of issues with using Assembla though. For one, I don’t like how I’m not in charge of my own data. Sure, with Subversion and Trac, I can just export the codebase back out using the standard interfaces they offer, but they have their own built in wiki and messaging system. I don’t see an easy way to export that data, because it would be nice to have a backup of the data… I don’t know how that would look like, since all of this data that exists on their servers is going to be in some proprietary format anywa.

The funny thing is for my job at NCSA, I had to do the same thing for the Blue Waters Project. I was in charge of looking into some project management, bug tracking, source control system. In the end, the suite of applications at Atlassian seemed to be the best bet. Since money wasn’t a problem, this was the valid choice.

Since all the funding for HanMeta is coming out of my pockets, it’s pretty important for me to keep my costs down. Using Assembla, I can effectively outsource all of the pain of maintaining and dealing with multiple tools. Plus, it was easy to get started.

I bet I won’t be saying the same when the Assembla servers go down… but that’s another story.