Its coming up to exams again. First exams in my masters, but exams nonetheless. A year ago I set up a wiki, and the main use for it I’ve had has been to store my notes for past subjects. It’s been pretty good so far, especially as exams have gone online and become open book. I was using MediaWiki for it, which involved running it in its own VM in order to enable extensions. When I was changing some hard drives in my server, I ended up corrupting the virtual disk and was unable to recover it. This resulted in me shelving the project until this year when I decided to recreate the site.
Originally I was going with MediaWiki again, but faced with setting up the VM and database back end, I hesitated. Looking around, Dokuwiki seemed to be the second most popular software, with its own set of plugins and a file based page store, rather than a database. Originally setting it up in a VM, I wasn’t pleased with its look but found its speed much better, even compared to a cached MediaWiki. I also tried a container and after finding plugins were compatible there also, I decided to go with that route.
Dokuwiki’s internal markup is a little inane, with heading levels increasing in level with the number of “=”, counter to most other markups. That said, it is fairly similar to org in that I can insert code and latex fairly easily inline, which is a lot more important to me. Additionally the latex generated is text based rather than image based, so it scales better and seems to load faster. The image handling is also easier to use than MediaWiki’s. I’m still getting used to namespaces, but they seem to make sense, but I did end up adding in tags to replace the lost categories.
As I mentioned earlier, Dokuwiki doesn’t look the best. I have played with a few themes but none seem to feel right. The default theme just seems to work, and get out of the way in presenting the content. As a result, I’m still searching for something to work, but there’s less need as the whole thing is working now.
Overall, I’m very happy with the current shift to Docuwiki. The site seems to be performing better, and has some neat features that I didn’t have before. At the moment its working well for notes, but I’ll have to slowly add some other pages, filling it out and making it a bit more general.