BrockLi Soup

I’m one of those people that’s easily frustrated if I can’t remember exactly when something happened and who was there with me. Maybe I just don’t want to lose memories, maybe I’m OCD…maybe I’m just anal, I don’t know.

Over a year ago (at least), I decided to start keeping track of things in my life. The idea probably started forming in the summer of 2003, when I found Jakob Lodwick’s (now defunct) list of people he knew. Despite the fact that wikis are typically used for collaborative editing, I decided that it would be the best way for me to record these details, mostly because of my two requirements: I want the ability to update it whenever the urge strikes me, and I want to be able to see revision history. Most wiki systems offer revision history (though I only considered MediaWiki at first), so the real hurdle was making it accessible everywhere. I’ve been getting into the habit of bringing my iBook everywhere I go, so I started off running it there. However, there are a lot of times that I want to use it elsewhere - if I’m typing a lot, I prefer doing it on my full-size desktop keyboard, and sometimes I want to add stuff at work so I don’t forget about it. As such, I settled on a wiki on a stick solution, and finally got everything working this weekend.

Now that I’ve got it all setup, I’m not even really sure what I want to put in there. Right now, I’ve got details on some of my time-based playlists - what music I was listening to during certain periods of time - and books I’ve read recently, but that’s about it. Before too long, I want to get back to that “people I know” part of the project: how I met people, how our relationship evolved, things like that. In my first attempt, three years ago, I only wrote about one person before (like so many of my projects) it fell by the wayside.

We’ll see where it takes me. I may make parts of it public eventually, but for now it’s just for me. I have this irrational fear of forgetting what I was going when, so I hope that will inspire me to keep up on it, but I have a habit of dropping personal projects when more interesting ideas come along. Having everything on a thumb drive will certainly make it easier to maintain, and maybe that will help this project stick.

I don’t know why I didn’t think to do more looking around before, but I’ve solved my wiki on a stick problem. Wikipedia has a comparison of wiki software, which includes a several that use flat-file databases.

As it turns out, DokuWiki works almost just like MediaWiki, in terms of formatting and revision history. In one of the config files, you specify the data directory, and it just works.

Unfortunately, it’s not a true wiki on a stick. It will run on any Windows machine right from the thumb drive; the instructions there use Uniform Server, which runs Apache, MySQL, and PHP right from the thumb drive. DokuWiki is installed in the www directory there, so I can run it anywhere I’ve got XP (or maybe 2000) and a USB port.

As I mentioned in my previous post, MAMP won’t run anywhere but /Applications/MAMP. Mark made the good point that I could create a symlink from the thumb drive to that directory (or vice versa? you know what I mean), but by that time I already had DokuWiki working and didn’t feel like spending more time on it. As such, MAMP runs on my iBook with a local install of DokuWiki that points to the data directory within the aforementioned www directory. Voila, everyone uses the same data, and I am appeased.

It isn’t as flexible as I was hoping, but I’m really only planning on using it in three places: my iBook, my home PC, and on rare occasions when I need to make a quick note, my work PC. I can’t run it on other Macs without installing and configuring MAMP and DokuWiki there, but for my purposes, this setup will serve me well.

Dear LazyWeb:

I want to share a MySQL database between two installations of PHP and MySQL on two different machines running at different times. Basically, I want a Wiki on a stick that I can run on Windows and my iBook. This is easy on Windows - just follow the instructions on the page linked there. Running a wiki on a Mac is unbelievably easy with MAMP.

The problem is pointing the both of them at the same MySQL data so I can update the info in either place. I can change the datadir in the MySQL config in MAMP, but it does me no good - MAMP has to be installed in /Applications/MAMP, or it just doesn’t work (it won’t even copy into other directories).

So I need to find another solution on the Mac, or a way to point the MAMP install of MySQL at an arbitrary directory. Anyone managed to do this?

Also, a couple notes:

• This isn’t a real LazyWeb request, since I’ve spent about 8 hours dicking around with this over the past few weeks. That’s not too lazy….right?
• I know about Tiddlywiki, but it’s not going to scale the way I want it to. This is going to be a big wiki and I don’t want it relying on having lots and lots of JavaScript in memory (their homepage made Firefox complain about running too long). I’d be open to other wiki systems (file based DB, maybe?) if they have the features of MediaWiki (revision history, mostly).
• I know I could just run this on the PC desktop and connect to it like any other website, but I’d like to keep it on the thumb drive if I can.

Any ideas are welcome.