awkiawki a light weight wiki as your personal wiki
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Last edited: $Date: 2015/09/26 15:43:08 $


> awkiawki is written in awk

## 2015 and still talking about wiki?

Wiki seems to be something of the dark ages. They were popular about
10  years  ago. So  why  bother  talking  about  a wiki,  let  alone
installing a wiki?

It  seems the  entire  internet has  become reduced  to  only a  few
vectors,  like  Facebook, GooglePlus  and  Evernote.  So why  bother
setting up a wiki?

When you start  using a personal wiki it will  quickly become a real
treasure. A wiki gives you the opportunity to quickly add a new page
and link from one to the other. You can make as many links and back-
links as  you like.  All your  stuff is  in it,  and you  can switch
quickly from one item to another. Make sure your wiki saves its data
as plain text files, so you can use powertools like grep on it.

> Hierarchies can get in the way

Most wikis are  unstructured, this means all your wiki  files are in
one big pool without any  subdirectories. On first glance this seems
to be a  bad thing. However, the  data is not on paper  but in files
so  you  can use  things  like  grep to  find  what  you need.  Also
unstructured actually helps in assosiative thinking. A wiki does not
commit you  to any hierarchical  structure at any point,  though you
can  introduce  it  through  a ordered  system  of  categories  with
category backlinks, see http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CategoryCategory.

Some people use their wiki as Zettelkasten (see
http://takingnotenow.blogspot.nl/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.htm).
Every  thought   and  every  idea   will  be  a  small   wiki  note,
interconnected to one or more other notes. While your knowledge-base
and idea-base grows the interlinks grow exponential, giving you much
opportunity to  get inspired with  new insights and new  ideas. Even
Jules Verne  worked like  this, leaving a  collection of  25000 fact
cards
(see http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-46407320.html,German)
after his death. See also this pdf (English) at Bristol reads:.
http://www.bristolreads.com/around_the_world/download_files/jules_verne.pdf.

Read more on Wikipedia page on Zettelkasten,
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten (German).

But perhaps your  usage could be more modest, with  just a few notes
how to use your bash-shell or  when your car has it last maintenance
service. No matter what your kind of  use is, a wiki should be fast,
easy and must make it very easy to add new pages. Some people have a
few issues with the  use of CamelCase to add new  pages, but this is
something you will grow into without much trouble.

## Light weight personal wiki

When you are a vi-user (or better: a vi-lover) then you sure want to
use Vimwiki. However, sometimes you want  a a wiki that is available
over the internet and can be used from within a browser. Vimwiki let
you  export your  wiki to  html, but  does not  give a  solution for
interaction over the internet like editing or adding pages.

> A personal wiki is great for keeping all your notes together.

There are many wikis available. My personal requirements are:

 * Must be light weight
 * Wiki data in flat files with plain Markdown-like syntax

### Light weight wiki

In most use cases, a light weight  wiki is just as good as a not-so-
light wiki.  You allmost never  need the  extra options of  the more
heavier wiki products.  Perhaps if you want to use  attachments or a
lot of images  a more feature-loaded wiki could be  a better option.
But if  you want  a personal  wiki for mostly  note taking,  a light
weight wiki will do fine.

I like small boards like the  Raspberry Pi and the BeagleBone Black.
When you  want to  deploy a  wiki on such  small boards,  then light
weight is really important.

I run my  awkiawki on a Raspberry  Pi with the data  on the SD-card,
and this setup up turns out to be fast enough for real daily usage.

### Plain text files

It is important that your wiki saves the wiki files as plain text
files.

 * First, we all love the power of plain text, see
   http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PowerOfPlainText.
 * You can all use all the text powertools on plain text files,
   see http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/tutorials/l-gnutex/
 * Plain text is great for revision control systems.
 * Future-proof: A wiki in plain text markdown-like files is easy
   to port to another wiki.
 * Ease of use: Plain text files are easy to edit, so you can edit
   your wiki both from your browser as well as from your editor

## awkiawki

Awkiawki is a wiki that uses awk. It is very light (about 300 lines of
code) and is very fast. See http://awkiawki.bogosoft.com/.

Awk  is available  on  all  the Unix  like  operating systems,  like
FreeBSD, OpenBSD  and Linux so  you can run awkiawki  anywhere. Just
add a webserver like lighttpd or apache.

Awkiawki saves the wiki files just as plain flat files.

### Revisions and page history

Awkiawki can put your wiki files on revison control. Simply put a line
with the following contents in your conf file:


   rcs=true


Also a sub-directory named RCS in your data directory, and make sure
you have rcs installed.

When you  have enabled rcs like  this then Awkiawki will  put a link
PageHistory under each page, which give  you a list with the revison
versions and some options to view different versions and diffs.

### Search in the contents of your wiki

As light  weight as  it is,  awkiawki comes  with a  powerful search
feature. On the right hand side of  the bottom of your wiki pages is
a small  input field  with a  search button.  Type something  in the
input field, hit  the search button and you will  be prompted with a
list of wiki pages containing the string you typed in the input box.

## Syntax

It seems like every wiki must invent its own syntax.

Fortunately, Awkiawki uses a classic  wiki syntax. If you don't like
that,  the code  of awkiawki  is easy  to read  so you  can do  some
changes to make it more to your liking.

I made some  changes to match the syntax to  some other wiki systems
that I use or have used.

Also, adding  support for  tables is not  very complicated,  see the
page of JW  Stumpel http://jw-stumpel.nl/a-wiki-on-a-home-gateway He
shows a lot more  changes to awkiawki, but you don't  have to do all
of  this, Awkiawki  is a  great wiki  right out  of the  box (a.k.a.
tab-ball).

## Commit to git

I like the PageHistory option and have enabled RCS. However, I still
run a small shell script that  automaticly commits any changes to my
central git repository.  That way I know that the  information in my
wiki will be in my backup :)
## Coexistence with vimwiki

I still use  vimwiki as my main solution for  my notes. Vimwiki uses
the  power of  Vim, and  the diary  option is  a great  solution for
connecting notes to dates.

The use of awkiawki  allows my to have a wiki that  can be used over
the  internet  with  a  browser  on  a  laptop,  tablet  or  even  a
smartphone.

So I am  thinking about a solution to integrate  both wikis. Vimwiki
has  its own  syntax  and adds  an extension  to  the filenames.  So
running vimwiki on the same files as the awkiawki is not possible.
## Just start

Remember to Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. Keep it
small, keep it simple. And just start!
http://c2.com/xp/DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork.htm

Install a  light weight wiki  with flat  plain text files  and start
using it. Soon you wonder how you ever lived without your wiki ...


$Id: awkiawki.txt,v 1.3 2015/09/26 15:43:08 matto Exp $

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