Manage Information and Documents with a Desktop Wiki

For quite a while I used Zim as a desktop wiki. It did a good job storing Notes, ToDo-Lists ets.

But recently I came to the conclusion, I need a more powerful wiki engine and I also wanted to get rid of those different places where documents are stored, namely my IMAP inbox, home directory, several SVNs etc..

Instead my new way of doing this is to store group documents in SVN and have a local working copy. Group information and general documents are stored in an intranet wiki. And my personal documents and information I will store on a local wiki.

My choice is MoinMoin as locally running wiki. It is quite simple, pure python and file based. Just call a simple script and it runs as a service. I want to start the server when I log in to Gnome, it can’t even be started before, because my home folder is encrypted using ecryptfs.

Here are the steps to take:

1. Download the latest version of MoinMoin and extract it to some local folder, such as /home/user/desptopwiki/moin-1.9.3
2. Start the server by starting it in a terminal python ~/moin-1.9.3/wikiserver.py
3. Test if it is running correctly by checking htp://localhost:8080 in a browser
4. I modified some settings of the server for example by activating the front page in ~/desktopwiki/moin-1.9.3/wikiconfig.py
5. To manage the server I created two scripts:
   • wikistart.sh
     

     #!/bin/bash
     
     if [ -e ~/desktopwiki/wiki.pid ]; then
         ~/desktopwiki/wikistop.sh
     fi
     
     ~/desktopwiki/moin-1.9.3/wikiserver.py &> /dev/null &
     echo $! > ~/desktopwiki/wiki.pid
     

   • wikistop.sh
     

     #!/bin/bash
     
     if [ ! -e ~/desktopwiki/wiki.pid ]; then
          exit 0
     fi
     
     PID=`cat ~/desktopwiki/wiki.pid`
     
     TMP=`ps -p $PID -o args= | grep wikiserver.py`
     
     if [ -n "$TMP" ]; then
          kill $PID
     fi
     
     rm ~/desktopwiki/wiki.pid
     

   I know this can be done much better and nicer, but this way it works fine. Don’t forget to make them executable!

6. Finally I added ~/desktopwiki/wikistart.sh to the programs started at gnome login via System->Preferences->Startup Applications

I did some minor changes to the Wiki configuration, but MoinMoin can be (locally!) used without nearly any changes to the configuration.

A last thing I did was to use prism to display the wiki and created a starter in the panel for this, because it looks nicer without all the browser stuff..

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