[Geek] ISO: Personal Wiki Software
Jul. 31st, 2004 05:53 pmOkay, 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...
I spent some of the afternoon brainstorming with
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...