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DokuWiki as private personal online wiki for reading notes
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Posted by nathanb
Jun 7, 2018 at 01:56 PM
>Paul Korm wrote:
>I could, but, no, I haven’t opened the NAS up to the Internet. The NAS
>is private data I don’t need to access remotely. If I did want to
>expose DocuWiki I would install it on one of the domains I own and host
>at Dreamhost. I don’t want to be in the self-hosting business when
>someone else can worry about the certificates, security, backup,
>operating system updates and patches, and so on.
>
This is a good point and one I struggle with. Torn between wanting to ‘control my own data’ and having to learn security (and keep continuously up-to-date on it). Having it ‘professionally’ hosted is better for both security and reliability. Maybe this is one of those 80/20 things where very little of my data is ‘top secret’ and I don’t care if it falls into the wrong hands. Therefore I should keep the sensitive info (~20% of files) on my internal system and keep the rest conveniently accessible on most screens in and out of the house.
Posted by Lucas
Jun 8, 2018 at 03:10 AM
A few months ago I also reached a point where DokuWiki seemed like the way to go for a personal wiki, so I spent some time trying to set it up to my satisfaction. (I used Bitnami, which for my purposes worked great.) Unfortunately, even with the various plugins available, I was unsuccessful in trying to fully implement some of the functionality I really like in ConnectedText (and to some extent WikidPad and Voodoopad), such as automatic linking, autocompletion of link names, listing of backlinks, and wiki-wide changing of link-name instances. Some of these features are available to certain degrees with plugins, but I found the experience frustrating in terms of what I was looking for, and as has been noted, plugins are often dropped by developers. True, DokuWiki probably is the best cross-platform solution for my needs as well, but for now I am holding out until some more features are added or something better comes along.
Posted by nathanb
Jun 8, 2018 at 01:59 PM
Thanks Lucas, that is helpful. Some of your specific issues are ones that are important to me. I’m looking for an agile personal wiki. If it’s a lot of work to encode the notes with links and metadata then I’ll end up not doing it consistently, therefore defeating the purpose.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 10, 2018 at 04:09 PM
Lucas wrote:
A few months ago I also reached a point where DokuWiki seemed like the
>way to go for a personal wiki, so I spent some time trying to set it up
>to my satisfaction. (I used Bitnami, which for my purposes worked
>great.) Unfortunately, even with the various plugins available, I was
>unsuccessful in trying to fully implement some of the functionality I
>really like in ConnectedText (and to some extent WikidPad and
>Voodoopad), such as automatic linking, autocompletion of link names,
>listing of backlinks, and wiki-wide changing of link-name instances.
>Some of these features are available to certain degrees with plugins,
>but I found the experience frustrating in terms of what I was looking
>for, and as has been noted, plugins are often dropped by developers.
>True, DokuWiki probably is the best cross-platform solution for my needs
>as well, but for now I am holding out until some more features are added
>or something better comes along.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Personally I don’t have any expectations of being able to replicate or even approximate CT’s functionality.
I also realise that I’d need to change the overall conceptual design of the database (to take advantage of the namespace functionality) and develop a new naming convention for the page names (as currently my CT topic names have a date and time stamp of when the note was taken, then author name and publication year, followed by a long descriptive title).
It sounds like the way forward in Dokuwiki is to keep things simple, so that there are not too many complex issues one needs to deal with later (such as mass renaming of pages or links).
It would still be nice if I could import somehow my current CT content. But I imagine that I’d need to edit the CT content to change page names, category syntax etc. and then I’d need to manually re-establish any existing links between them.
Posted by Chris Thompson
Jun 11, 2018 at 02:08 PM
Given your concerns, if you haven’t tried it, you should give Notion.so a shot as an alternative to Dokuwiki. It has a similar basic concept (plain text files for pages, ability to download the whole shebang as a series of folders and text files and unmodified attachments), but they do the hosting and it’s like a batteries included Dokuwiki, with a ton of built in functionality included. It also has an innovative sub-pages concept that is basically just like nested Dokuwiki namespaces. Also there are Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android apps.
—Chris
nathanb wrote:
Thanks Lucas, that is helpful. Some of your specific issues are ones
>that are important to me. I’m looking for an agile personal wiki. If
>it’s a lot of work to encode the notes with links and metadata then I’ll
>end up not doing it consistently, therefore defeating the purpose.