Re: Apple II wiki

["Warren Ernst" <wernst@gmail.com>]

Gabriel,

Well, it seems like we have a little dialog going. ;-) Cool.

First off, so you know, I've already set up wikis and other CMS systems
(I like and do a very small amount of development for Drupal, myself,
but that's another story) on Linux and Windows (ugh!) hosts. So I'm all
up on the tech.

So I guess you're saying that you have a hosting plan that only allows
one MySQL database, so you're sharing it between different CMS systems?
Really? Wow. Most hosting plans I know about allow multiple databases
per account. Heck, the company I'm buying cheap hosting with allows
UNLIMITED MySQL databases per account.

When I made my suggestion, I was assuming you had a seperate MySQL
database for the Apple 2 Wiki, so backing it up would be a breeze. I
also naturally assumed you were using an off-the-shelf installation of
MediaWiki (that banner ad was the giveaway <G>) I wouldn't  have
suggested something that required you to buy anything else or totally
shift your hosting plan around.

Perhaps another option is DokuWiki, which happens to be a highly
regarded wiki that doesn't use a database. All files are stored in,
well, flat text files. This would make public backups extremely easy to
do - just gzip a folder and all of its children, and you're done. Its
located at http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki, and compared to
other wiki packages at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software

Needless to say, I'm aware that the content of the site would
essentially be in the hands of everyone but you. That's the strength of
the wiki for a community with as much info spread out like it is here
with ours.

But again, I need to stress the issues relating to "my concern for your
health," as you put it. I think you're missing my point. Let's say
you're hosting the wiki for, say, 4 years. It gets HUGE, and has
massive cross-linking to internal articles and exteral sites. And let's
say you've paid up for hosting for  6 years. And then you get hit by a
bus. (Again, God forbid.)

Two years pass, and suddenly the site goes dark. Or say the web hosting
company has a problem 1 year after you're gone, has no one to contact,
and let's some database problem go unfixed. We all see the problem, but
the hosting company won't let anyone else get access to the hosting
control panel other than you. There's no going back at this point.
There's nothing to access to copy and paste to new files.

And because this is a wiki, we can't just click "display source HTML"
for each page, save it, and rebuild the wiki from scratch anyway.
That's what database backups are for. If the backup is made available
regularly and automatically (I'd set up a cron job to do it once a
month, for example), then anyone could pick up the pieces and rebuild
the wiki anywhere.

So, with that said, are you sure you aren't able to use multiple
databases with MediaWiki? Want to consider DokuWiki instead? Any more
thoughts? Anyone else want to chime in?

-Warr