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Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Wikis or blogs?

One of my readers commented that he thought that people should use wikis rather than blogs. I agree with him (for the same reasons he mentions). The ideal CMS (Content Management System) for me would look something like this:

  • On the basis it should have a wiki. I often write tutorials, and the main characteristics of the tutorials is that they out of date and need to be updated.
  • An other characteristic of Wikis which I like is the transparency: they show the complete edit history (of course, history can be changed by those who have access to the server, but I'm speaking generally here). I try to always add an Update part to my posts which I edit, but most probably I've forgot (and will forget) a few times.
  • One thing I didn't like about Wikis whish include blog functionality is the fact that edited posts appear in the RSS either as a diff (which is ugly and hard to read) or as the complete post. I would prefer the following arrangement: on edit, the complete post should appear in the RSS feed, with a small button / link which would take me to a diff on the rendered page (using background color for example to show inserted / deleted / edited content), similar to the WiX example.
  • The editing should be done using something more humane than HTML. For example markdown.
  • It should support tags.
  • It should have automatic syntax highlight for source code.
  • It should have support for the usual blog features like displaying the time of the post, RSS feeds, comments per post, etc.

Maybe someday I get off my lazy behind and implement something in Perl/Python/PHP. But then again, I would have to rent a VPS (Virtual Private Server) and find justification for spending ~20 USD on it monthly... Using something ready-made is not out of the question, but it certainly won't be Wordpress (I don't want to worry each day about the security of the server - yes, they've gotten better, but still it is a big target which results in many exploits being created).

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous10:12 AM

    Have you tried http://www.wikyblog.com/ ?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous8:13 AM

    A great example of how blogs fail by not scaling:

    hell.http://villageofjoy.com/50-strange-buildings-of-the-world/.

    Cool post right? Except that there's a part II. Then there's another post on that blog, "Unusual buildings of the world". And another one, "Another 6 weird building". And a third one.

    What am I supposed to bookmark here?

    Use wikis!

    ReplyDelete
  3. yep I know that this post series could be a bit confusing, but if you wonder what to bookmark.. bookmark Part I, and the next time you want to visit it, you will start from the part I and go on to Part II and Part III :)

    ReplyDelete