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Archive for May 25th, 2002

2002-05-25

Sun May 26 04:11:00 2002

So, after months of faffing around peering at different Wiki implementations, I’ve finally made my Big Decision. I’m moving all of commonhouse‘s wikis over to MoinMoin. It looks like the Wiki for me: extensible, a nice bunch of prepared macros, vibrant developer community, written in Python – plus it just hit 1.0.

My big questions, though, couldn’t be answered by staring at READMEs. I needed to know where I could hack MoinMoin to run many instances of different wikis off the one copy; whether I could keep all the data in the slightly weird places commonhouse likes to keep data. And could I easily copy the existing wikis over from the existing wikis we already run? To answer those, I had to install the little fella.

I did all but the porting of old wikidom tonight, in about an hour. The most idiosyncratic stuff I did by changing about four lines of code in moins_config.py, and some slight mod_rewrite fu. The rest was a breeze. Fun even.

Moinmoin has an XML-RPC interface, and I’m going to try to use that to port the old C2.com style wikis over tomorrow night. Then I’m going to play around with its calendar and blogging macros. Oh yes.

evenly matched, this battle is.

So we all went to Baycon SF convention as part of my early conditioning prior to visiting WorldCon in September. I suffered only minor culture shock (primarily over the Sailor Moon ladies and a women dressed in slightly less than a sheet).

Then we went to watch Brad Templeton, chair of the EFF, get called a “motherfucker” by Harlon Ellison in a debate about copyright issues. Admittedly, Harlon’s primary critique of Brad at that point was that he was “looking at [Harlon] funny”. But he didn’t have much good to say about the Net either.

I channelled the whole thing to the scofflaws on “an Internet” (as Harlon called it in passing) via the #infoanarchy IRC channel. For those who like garbled transliterations, here’s the log.