general I’m a dork!

Posted April 26, 2007 • Comments Off on I’m a dork!

I decided I wanted a personal wiki, for things like recipes and shopping lists and packing lists and whatnot. After I’d torn about my thirtieth page out of last month’s Real Simple, I started thinking about scanning stuff and realized it’d be fine to retype it, if only there were an appropriate repository.

I tried pbwiki.com, but one page into creating a wiki there I realized there was no Special:Whatlinkshere page, and that would just be stupid, especially for recipes. What I wanted was the ability to wikify every recipe I entered, and then have ingredient pages, so I could click on the name of an ingredient and see every recipe that uses that ingredient. I don’t even cook that much, but I want to, and god do I love sorting stuff into piles.

So I looked at a couple other free public wiki sites, even a couple that host MediaWiki (the software Wikipedia runs on), but they were all either ad-supported (Google ads keyed to the content of my own pages creeps me out, even in Gmail) or the interface didn’t look good, or I just got bad vibes. I’ve had a lot of practice at Wikipedia. I know how it works and how to use it. How hard could it be, I figured, to run it?

Turns out: medium. Medium hard.

Macs come with Apache set up already. Check. Installing PHP was a breeze, thanks to installation packages available at entropy.ch. Check. Installing mysql was a little harder, but honestly the biggest hurdle there was figuring out where the crap it was so I could put it in my path. Without the fact that Medievia taught me Unix, and (bizarrely) the instructions I found were keyed to tcsh (which I use) rather than bash (which I don’t), it might have been worse. There was some command-line stuff I had to do. I followed the excellent installation instructions on the MediaWiki site. (When I reached the bottom of that page, there was an alternate installation method I could have done, where I wouldn’t even have had to download anything ending in .tar.gz. There should probably be a link to that at the top.)

It started working. I even toyed with the CSS a bit to make it match this design (what can I say, bright fucking orange is somehow soothing to me now). And now, when I go to localhost/~elaine/wiki, lo and behold, there’s an empty orange version of Wikipedia right there, and it’s mine.
Right now it’s only accessible to me locally, but I plan to punch a hole so I can get at it from other computers. It’ll only work from other computers when my computer’s here and turned on, but when my computer’s not here and turned on, it’s a safe bet it’s with me anyway.

I’m a little nervous about opening a web port and about creating other accounts (the warnings they give you are a little scary and include words like “could upload malicious php code”), but I’ll probably get over it. Ideally, among other things I’d make it possible for my friends and I to keep a collaborative recipe database in it. That would be useful to us.
And then maybe I’ll show it to you.