A Swing and a Miss
05 Mar 2021
After a long hiatus, I wanted to look into hosting a Wiki. I ended up looking at some pages like this.
I wanted to meet the following requirements:
- Data stored in the cloud, under version control (git)
- Handles Markdown formatting, as well as code
I came across TiddlyWiki, which is an amazing invention for the following reasons:
- The wiki is written in Javascript, and since almost all modern web browsers are effectively just Javascript VMs these days, there is no need for any intermediate processing or interpretation
- The wiki is a Quine, which is an obscure computer science concept, whereby running a piece of code produces its own code as output
- Therefore, deploying the wiki is as simple as loading the (single) Javascript file into a browser
I was able to get it running hosted on GitHub Pages, but I found a few obstacles:
- There is no practical security available. The Wiki can be marked as read-only for everyone, or open for everyone.
- As the Wiki grows, so does the Javascript file that contains it. This results in managing a large git blob, that gets slower and slower as more commits are made to it.
- It does not really support Markdown formatted posts directly, and the Markdown plugin did not seem to be entirely compliant