Mike Freeman
<mjf AT SabMagFAQ DOT org>
Ramblings
I haven't been on the SabMag.org mailing list for some time, and don't contribute much to the wiki. It's been over five years since I stopped riding a SabMag, and my knowledge of the details of the bike have faded rather rapidly, so I don't feel I have much at all to contribute to technical discussions. Also, when I moved from Cincinnati to Louisiana, I separated myself from the 'Maggot friends I had made. I'm still friends with them, but I don't see them more than once a year--if even that--so I've become kind of a periphery member of the community.
I started this wiki more from an interest in the IT stuff, not so much because I thought I had anything new to bring to the FAQ. I had built a MoinMoin-based wiki at work that I thought worked well, so I wanted to see if I could translate that experience to a personal use. Finding out how to register a domain name, and tracking down a host for the wiki and all that was new to me. (At work, the wiki was served internal off of a computer that sat on my desk. Indeed, at first I had no funding, so it was served off of an old iMac Blueberry of mine, that I had managed to get a PowerPC version of Ubuntu to run on.)
Now that the wiki is established, it's become boring for me. I mean, there's nothing on the technical side that really needs to be done. The hosting company takes care of maintaining the wiki engine, web server, etcetcetc. All that's left is adding and refining content, and, as I said above, my knowledge of the content is fading fast, being supplanted by info about my current bike, a DRZ400SM. (Once it's gone and replace by some other bike, I'll forget the details about it, too.)
Why MoinMoin?
Like a lot of people Wikipedia was my first interaction with a wiki. In the early days of the job where I ended up building my own wiki, I had a lot of free time, and I started contributing to Wikipedia. (I don't anymore--indeed, I'm somewhat anti-Wikipedia--but that's another story.) I realized that wiki could be a really useful way to keep, organize and share work information. How many times have you worked some place that had a ragged, faded post-it that contained the magic trick to getting some old piece of equipment to work right? It happens a lot, in my experience. An on-line repository would be so much better. Besides, I tend to be really good at solving problems, but really bad at remembering the solution. Anyway, so I wanted to try a wiki as a way to document what I knew, figured out, etc, so that I could reference it later, and I could share it. And, as it turned out, leave it behind--I've left that job, but the wiki is there to show people where the unlabeled "display reset" button is on the K4000ng (and how to get to it).
At first I looked into implementing the wiki engine that Wikipedia uses. That's what I was familiar with. But that thing is way over-kill for 99% of wikis in the world. It was built for the ambitions of Wikipedia--a wiki with a 100,000 or more pages. It's actually backed by a relational database. The wiki engine passes SQL to the database, then converts the mark-up text it gets back into valid HTML.
I wish I could say I realized that MediaWiki, or WikiMedia or what-the-hell-ever their calling it now was over-kill right off and moved past it. But I didn't. Instead I struggled with implementing MySQL on Windows for a few months before giving up and starting over.
I'd assumed that Wikipedia was the vanguard of wikis and such. I discovered I was dead wrong, and that wikis had been around before Wikipedia, and there was a whole world of wikis out there that had/have nothing to do with Wankerpedia, er, I mean, Wikipedia. I finally realized that what I needed was a more modest wiki engine. But, I had hopes that once I got a wiki working, my co-workers would start to use it--not just to look things up, but to contribute to it, also. I wasn't working in the IT field, so I needed something that casual users could approach.
MoinMoin was (and is) a popular wiki that offers a GUI editor. To me, that seemed like a really good thing to have to get non-geeky people willing to try to work with a wiki. It also doesn't use any kind of relational database on the back-end. It just stores things in a flat file-structure on the hard drive. Etcetcetc. It was a pretty straight-forward process to get a MoinMoin wiki up and running from scratch on a computer running Ubuntu. (Why Ubuntu? That's a different saga.) I struggled with it, but that's because I'm a chemist by training. All this IT stuff I pick up as I go along. (My main IT skill is being able to make friends with people who are good at IT, and being able to come up with "intelligent" questions.)
So, MoinMoin was the wiki I had success with. And, as I used it more and more, I realized that while it didn't have the capabilities of a MediaWiki, it was more than capable enough for anything I would ever want to do. And, it continues to be popular and well supported. Light, fast, capable, and easy to use. What's not to like? (Any speed issues you have with the SabMagFAQ wiki has nothing to do with MoinMoin. It has to do with the fact that it's hosted by a co-op, which charges very low fees, as opposed to a commercial hosting company, which charge high fees.)
Cheap Bastard
It's not just a label that I wear with pride, it's a way of life. So, the SabMagFAQ wiki runs on free/open-source software, is hosted by a co-op, and is registered by a company in France. Check out the wiki's page footer for links.