Terminally Incoherent

Recently I discovered Instiki - a quick and not-so-dirty way of running a wiki without much setup. For example, to run MadiaWiki (the original Wiki package, used by Wikipedia) you need to have a functional web server, a supported database and PHP installed on your machine. With Instiki - you just need Ruby. It serves pages using WebRick and uses SQLite to store data, making it a perfect personal wiki for jotting down notes.

Would I use it for high traffic production wiki? Not really. For what it’s worth don’t think that WebRick and SQLite offer a scalable solution. I would go with MediaWiki for that. But I found that Instiki works great if you just want to have a personal local wiki on your machine.

When I tried it on Windows, it ran out of the box. On Dapper (Ubuntu) I had to download the sqlite module for ruby via apt as they don’t seem to be included in the base ruby package:

apt-get install libsqlite3-ruby1.8

I really like this app - it is small, self contained, and full featured. I played around with several personal wiki’s that are out there, but Instiki is the best one I have seen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 11:13 pm and is filed under technology, software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Related Posts: