TITLE: chicowiki announcement AUTHOR: david DATE: 1/18/2007 12:33:00 PM ----- BODY: I've had the idea of chicowiki on the back burner for quite a while now, but it seems like it might finally be happening thanks to the help of a few very kind people. As you may remember I registered chicowiki.net a few months ago in hope that it may become a wiki similar to daviswiki. Well, on January 10th, the domain chicowiki.org was released to the public domain where it was promptly snatched up by one of those domain kiting schemes. I put my bid in and as luck would have it, I'm the proud new owner of chicowiki.org! I've also been in contact with a guy in town named Ryan who started a chico-oriented wiki at cityplaza.org, and we've both been in touch with a couple of guys from Davis who are behind the daviswiki. Long story short, chicowiki is now hosted on the same server as DW, using the same software engine. There's only about 100 articles as of yet (mostly written by Ryan), but there are a few people, myself included, who are excited to go in and clean up and organize and start writing for the masses! It must be official... after I registered the domain name, chicowiki got its first piece of mail: chicowiki mail It may be spam (of the snail-mail variety) but hey, it's still addressed to chicowiki! So please, please, PLEASE go to ChicoWiki, create an account, and start contributing! We will be going through lots of changes in the future, including a redesign, server move, and huge software update, but I promise that all the data will remain intact through it all :)

Labels:

BLOGGERID: 687710898663104416 -------- TITLE: shifting gears AUTHOR: david DATE: 11/16/2006 02:15:00 PM ----- BODY: I've shifted gears with chicowiki. I've been talking to one of the guys behind daviswiki, and it turns out that there is something bigger and grander in the works already, so I'm just going to help them out where I can with my not-quite-leet python skills. Of course, this will manifest itself as chicowiki, but with a bit more to it behind the scenes. We'll see how it goes, but I'm still really excited to see this happen.

Labels:

BLOGGERID: 1909666120001928019 -------- TITLE: chicowiki AUTHOR: david DATE: 11/14/2006 07:27:00 PM ----- BODY: 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: ,

BLOGGERID: 1395236151378533093 --------