Tuesday, November 14, 2006

chicowiki

I am starting to get really excited about the chicowiki. I'm probably putting way too much time that should otherwise be devoted to schoolwork into it, but I truly believe it will be worth it.

Currently I'm testing out two different wiki backends to start modding to my liking:

• MoinMoin a la Sycamore - which would be really cool because it's being developed by the kind folks over at daviswiki. It's already tailored to our needs (sort of), but it's also written in python.
• MediaWiki - which you will recognize from Wikipedia. Upside is that it's got a ridiculous amount of support and a massive user base thanks to wikipedia. Also, it's written in PHP, which I know quite well so features would be a snap to add. Downsides are it's super bulky with lots of features that a small community would not be able to utilize right off the bat.
• Others? - I've been poking around wikipedia looking for other alternatives, but it seems like it's going to be one of the above.

I've got copies of both running on various servers, and am trying to make an educated, forward-thinking decision about which to use, because if all goes well, this will be around for quite a while.

The next biggie is hosting. I have a mondo-account over at (mt) which could host a MediaWiki install, but not a Sycamore install, and it's a bit slow anyway. I also don't want to be tied to a shared-server setup and have to worry about eating too much CPU time, etc...

This begs for a dedicated server. I would rather not lease one from a place like serverbeach or 1and1 because they tend to be overpriced and still leave me with that bad "shared environment" feeling in my mouth.

So chicowiki is officially in the market for a 1U rackmount server to be hosted at a datacenter somewhere... somewhere. I have a couple leads on the hardware, which is most likely going to wind up being a used dual P3 1.2 Ghz HP with a couple gigs of ECC RAM, but it's still got nowhere to live. I have looked into local (Chico) ISPs which were all way overpriced, but I know a guy from working at Shasta.com in Redding who says that he can colo for ~$70 per month with a 512k connection. 512k? I guess it can always be upgraded if it's not a fat enough pipe.

Phew, just a few of the things I'm thinking about for this project. I'm excited!

Labels: chicowiki, geek

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