Personal Wiki [Continued]

A few days ago I wrote about an idea to set up a personal wiki space and how I was stuck at apparent big variety of wiki tools to choose from.

The choice really came down to hosted (thus available from anywhere) vs. local (thus available offline). I considered it for a while and figured that ability to work with my personal knowledgebase offline (say on a plane) was more important. And then if I need to I can host my knowledgebase out. Deal.

Next step was much easier than I thought. To pick a wiki tool for local deployment from a huge list of options I followed a simple selection process:

1. filter the list down to only tools that have been out there for a while (a few year I figured is Ok to secure product roadmap and stability) and have recently had fresh stable release (this year was recent enough for me)


2. must be open source and free


3. better not require anything I don't have installed (database, app server, etc.)

DokuWiki was my instant choice. It's been there for about 4 years, it's file-based so no database setup/configuration hassle, and it only requires Apache + PHP. Apache is always around and PHP was apparently in place too.

I have installed it 15 minutes ago and I am already using it. Dan gave me a good advice (though I didn't pick the suggested wiki tool) - "just start typing".

The best thing to do after you came across a thought to have a personal wiki space is to go ahead and create it!

Personal Wiki

I figured I need a personal wiki, a knowledge management and self-organization tool. I imagined a small personal portal that is a mixture of a wiki, a file drive, and a to-do lists management. Ideally a built-in mind mapping tool too but this one is a nice to have. I also considered whether I needed Outlook integration and decided I did not. I don't want to mix priorities. Outlook is my do-right-now-all-about-work tool and this one I target to organize my writings, readings, ideas, R&D topics, learning priorities, etc.

ok. where do I start? if you faced with a multi-criteria choice problem and you didn't know where to start what would you do? I thought I weight my criteria and start with the most important one. Wiki is definitely the key and if powerful enough may well end up being all I need. Great. what do you do next? Google.

do you know how many different wiki tools there are? I thought there would be a dozen commercial platforms and a few open source, some of which I thought might target personal usage. Who needs more, right? Take a look:

Comparison of wiki software

so where do I start now ?