Are you Wiki ?

I gave a try to UseModWiki (an implementation of the original Wiki concept created by Ward Cunningham) and found it simply superb! We can use this internally across the teams for sharing information :-)

The name wiki comes from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki, which means quick/fast. There is a famous quote by Glen Wilber: "Knowledge grows faster than the way to organize it !". Wiki does provide an efficient and simpler way to organize and spread the ever growing knowledge across the entire team. It enables easy collaboration and sharing of information across the network.

Why wiki ?
- Similarity to HTML
- Instant Feedback Mechanism
- Accessible anywhere
- Easy Searching
- Easy to learn and use
- Open Source
- Tracking of pages

Installation steps on Windows :-

- Install active perl (http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/)
- Install Apache Web Server (http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi)
- Extract usemod10 (http://www.usemod.com/wikicode/usemod-1.0.5.zip.)
- Copy wiki.gif from extracted usemod directory to apache htdocs folder.
- Copy wiki.pl from extracted usemod directory to apache cgi-bin folder.
- Edit the first line of wiki.pl so that it shows the right path to perl.exe. (say c:/perl/bin/perl)
- Edit wiki.pl to change the value of $DataDir so that it points to "wikidb" folder (say d:\usemodwiki\wikidb )
- Edit wiki.pl to change the value of $FullUrl so that it points to 'http://localhost/cgi-bin/wiki.pl'
- Start the Apache server.
- Open a browser and type in the url : http://machine-name/cgi-bin/wiki.pl where machine-name refers to the name of your local machine.
e.g. http://localhost/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

Once installed, the wiki is accessible across all machines in the same domain.

This is the simple page that I created on my local machine :-



And clicking on 'RailsTips' link navigates to other page that I created as :-



I will be writing more on formatting rules in my upcoming blog ...

Enjoy being wiki ... :-)