[Geek] ISO: Personal Wiki Software

[jducoeur]

Okay, so let's talk briefly about something that has nothing to do with Carolingia, LJ, or anything of the sort.

I spent some of the afternoon brainstorming with hungrytiger about Tabula Rasa III. On my way home, I was pondering what I needed to do when I got home: pull up the Characters file, and the Plots file, and the Ideas file, update all of them, put in the crosslinks, and so on. And it occurred to me that surely there's a better way to do this.

I think what I want is probably a wiki. Designing a LARP is all about top-down design, and cross-references. I come up with an idea, add it into the global web in various ways, and gradually flesh in the nodes with more detail. A wiki isn't perfect -- most don't seem to have strong categorization support, which would be ideal -- but it's not half-bad, and could be used for my purposes fairly easily with a little manual discipline.

I'm not dead-set on a Wiki per se, but I'm looking for something very strongly designed around hyperlinking. LARP design requires a complex web of concepts, and software that supports a web is essential.

So do folks have suggestions for a good piece of software for me? It must run fairly easily on Windows. Perl and Apache are acceptable constraints -- they'd require some setup work, but both are running on my home PC as a matter of course. Something Web-based would be nice but not mandatory -- it would make it fairly easy for me to use on my LAN. My knowledge of Wikis is very shallow at this point -- I know the concepts, but not much of the details. It must be secure, and I would strongly prefer to host it myself, so that I can be confident about security -- ASP approaches make me nervous for a project like this.

Ideas and suggestions are welcomed...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

For just this purpose I use UseMod. It's just a perl cgi-bin script, which requires only a directory on your webserver, perl, and any random webserver that does cgi-bin or the equivalent. It's also well-documented, and therefore extensible...

I also use it (now) to store my writing and my research notes -- wiki format for me really helps with the brainstorming aspect of both.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Forgot to mention -- re: security, it's just as insecure as your next web site; you can layer whatever you want on top of it. Currently mine is sooper-obscure-secure, but then, I'm not really doing anything serious.

[jducoeur]

That's fine -- by the nature of using a cablemodem (especially with a wireless router), it's pretty damned difficult to get to my Apache server from the outside. Indeed, last time I checked, outgoing HTTP was blocked from this node. (A holdover from the old Red Alert worm.)

So security-through-obscurity should do. I just get nervous about using anything running on a public site, since this game, by its nature, requires *deep* secrecy about the details...

[asim.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'll have to ask someone who I know just went through a week-long course on wikis recently, but here's my thoughts.
I think that for setups of >10 preople, wikis are overkill. I've found the ones I've tried to be rough to setup -- not nearly as complex as SlashCode, but a good bit of work.
If all you're looking for is, in essence, a one-man CMS, I'd lean towards a blogging solution like Movable Type, or WordPress if you're interested in a "pure" Open Source Perl tool along the same lines. They tend to be much easier to setup and admin, but give you much the same goals if you're doing most of the edited, and the pages aren't meant to be very complex. Some of your web interlinking ideas might be well-played with Linkbacks as well.

One question is, what do you mean by "strong categorization support"?

And I agree about ASP. I'm learning it right now for a project at work, and it's security model depends far too much on a fragile web of dependences, most of which are very poorly documented. But, then, I've not even heard of a ASP-based wiki. Would you be willing to learn PHP? Most Wikis I know of are based in that language, these days.

[jducoeur]

I've found the ones I've tried to be rough to setup

Hmm; useful to know. I'd really prefer something that isn't much harder to set up than, eg, Apache.

If all you're looking for is, in essence, a one-man CMS

No, not really -- indeed, my textfile solution is already quite well CM'ed. (I have CVS running locally for that.)

The issue isn't CM; rather, it's getting something that makes it *really easy* to hyperlink a large number of short entries together robustly. Each individual entry is anywhere between a sentence and a page, but will often carry a large number of hyperlinks. Blog solutions really aren't right -- they're designed around individual heavyweight objects that are lightly linked; I'm dealing with heavily linked lightweight objects.

The nice thing about a Wiki is that the hyperlinking is more or less free, and automatic. I don't even have to think about it, just establish some StudlyCaps conventions that make the Wiki deal with the hyperlinking for me. That would be *very* convenient for this project, since I have literally several hundred text objects I'm juggling.

One question is, what do you mean by "strong categorization support"?

Well, for example, many of the objects I'm dealing with are characters. My ideal solution would let me simply mark the entry up with "this is a character", and the system would automatically spit out lists of characters on demand.

Most Wikis I've seen are strong on hyperlinking, but weak on this sort of object-oriented viewpoint of the objects they contain. I can work around that, but my *perfect* one would have strong metadata support for situations like this.

And I agree about ASP.

Actually, I meant "ASP" in the generic sense, rather than the specific. Microsoft's usual attempts to co-opt everything under the sun aside, when I say "ASP" I usually just mean "an Application Service Provider" -- a service available on the Web.

Would you be willing to learn PHP? Most Wikis I know of are based in that language, these days.

Well, learning a language is rarely an issue for me. (I pick up languages in my sleep.) But I'd prefer not to do much programming for this: ideally, I'd like something that's relatively boxed, that I mostly just have to set up and do a little customization on.

[rickthefightguy.livejournal.com]

When is the game going to run, and where?

[jducoeur]

You're *way* ahead of me here. The game is at the "heavily designed" stage right now -- we've got a good broad idea of what's going on, who many of the characters are, and so on. But it's nowhere near ready to run yet, and I made a promise a long time ago that this one wouldn't be scheduled until it was at least most of the way there.

So the correct answer is, "eventually, somewhere". I'm determined to make it happen (otherwise, I'll never get the damned thing out of my head), but it's still only on the middle burner. Certainly not within the next year, anyway...

[mindways]

A wiki with decent search support should serve your needs nicely - while I haven't seen one which supports strong categorization, the dirt-simple hack of "put keywords at the top of the page, preceded by asterisks" ought to do the trick. (So each character would have the string '*character' at the top, and you could have a character page which includes an automatically generated link to each page with '*character' in it).

Actually, thinking about it, you'd probably simply want to make the keywords wiki-links (either Character, PlotKw, etc if you're using CamelCase, or ["*character"], ["*plot"], etc if you're using explicit hyperlinking.) I know that MoinMoin supports that level of searching and regular-expression matching of pages; there are probably ten gazillion other Wikis which do also. Here's a reference page on different wiki engines.

If you were using a Mac, I'd recommend VoodooPad, which is effectively a purely local wiki done as an app rather than via the web - perfect for security, no matter what your 'net connection is. There may be a Windows equivalent (by some other name; VoodooPad is Mac-only) on downloads.com.

And yes - wikis are great for LARP design, as well as many forms of GM plotting for tabletop games. I spec'd out what was effectively a local-app wiki (like VoodooPad or whatnot) years ago for the notes on one of my tabletop campaigns, but never got around to actually building it.

[mindways]

Grah. s/Character/CharacterKw/ in the second paragraph. The point would be to have the keyword itself link to the list of all pages with that keyword in them.

[dsrtao]

If you want a secure, full-featured Wiki run on Apache and Perl, you want TWiki. http://www.twiki.org
You'll want:
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/TWiki/WindowsInstallCookbook
which runs you through installing on Windows.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I would second dsrtao's recommendation of TWiki, although when we were setting it up as coordinating representation for LARP-writing we found making security work properly can be irritating. You also probably want to give some thought to how whatever software you use can usefully export the data, if you want to continue to use it beyond the rough design phase. Spitting out to pretty PDFs would be nice...

[jducoeur]

Well, as I was remarking to metahacker, security through obscurity *is* probably sufficient for this purpose, so long as it's running on my home Windows box.

I agree that export is an interesting and relevant question, though. Any opinions about the merits of any of the suggested implementations in that regard? Even being able to spit out HTML would be helpful.

(I suppose, worse came to worst, that I could write export routines myself, so long as the thing was written in Perl. But it would be nice to minimize the necessary work.)

[laurion]

Our own natb has put together something he is calling LML (Larp Markup Language) for doing similar things. I would also look at some sort of software that is very good at not only maintaining relationships between chunks of data, but presenting that to you in a coherent view so you can see where things are weak, or not tied in enough, etc. On OS X I'd use OmniGraffle. On Windows, I know that Uncle Don uses a bit of software he affectionately refers to as 'the brain'. You could ask him what it actually is, but it does the same thing.

The gut reaction to go with a Wiki is practical in the sense that it allows for easy editing and rapid linking, but it does a poor job (IMO) of showing the relationships between things.

[jducoeur]

I suspect LML is a bit more manual than what I'm looking for at this point. Part of the attraction of a Wiki is the auto-linking between nodes. (LML with a powerful IDE on front of it might well be perfect, but I suspect he's not that far along yet.)

I've heard of The Brain, but haven't looked into it yet. Interesting suggestion -- thanks...