Swiki mentioned in TidBITS
Duane T Williams
duane at cmu.edu
Tue Mar 20 16:27:28 UTC 2001
http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-572.html#lnk3
The latest issue of TidBITS has the final installment in Adam Engst's
series on document collaboration and part of the article is devoted to
Wikis. After I told him about Swiki, he included it in his article. The
above link takes you to the whole article. The following excerpt is what
he said about Swiki.
**Wiki on the Mac** -- Although I found the public WikiWeb site, I
wanted to see about running a wiki on a Mac. Most wikis are
written in nominally cross-platform languages like Java or Perl,
but I have neither the time nor the expertise to get them running
on a Mac. Then I was alerted to the existence of Swiki, which was
written in a Smalltalk variant called Squeak, developed initially
as a research project at Apple (the developers reportedly followed
Alan Kay to Disney). Swiki (I can't believe they missed naming it
SqWiki, or "squeaky") requires its own Web server, called
Comanche, and you can download and install the complete package
for free. It wasn't hard - just follow the instructions on the
second link below (since the instructions themselves are on a
wiki, I did some editing in the one place I found them confusing).
<http://pbl.cc.gatech.edu/myswiki>
<http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/swiki/16>
I haven't tested it under any strain, but it seems to work on my
PowerBook G3 (other than email notification of changed pages).
I've also been impressed with Swiki's feature set - although I'm
by no means experienced with wikis, Swiki seems to offer
significantly more features in terms of formatting and access
controls than many other implementations. If you like playing with
Internet servers, Swiki is definitely worth a look.
Although the PowerBook is a lousy server machine for the simple
reason that I take it offline on occasion, I'm considering testing
Swiki as a way to collaborate with authors on TidBITS article
drafts. The two main drawbacks are that editing tools available in
a Web browser text field are primitive at best, and we'd lose our
internal color coding system if we took the text out of Nisus
Writer. However, I think I can address these criticisms with a
macro that uses Nisus Writer as the editing environment and
translates between Nisus Writer's formatting and Swiki markup.
We'll see how it works, and perhaps I'll end up with an additional
resource in my document collaboration tool kit for future
projects. In the meantime, I hope this series has been helpful in
providing ideas for your own collaboration needs, and make sure to
share other approaches you've used on TidBITS Talk.
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