Wikis revisited

I've always thought that web-sites should be easy to produce, edit and maintain, and I've done quite a bit of work on making this possible, but very little of it has escaped from research into the real world. But I'm very much a nudger, and so I'll keep trying something until it sticks, or else I just keep trying.

So after having used Joe Kraus and co's 'JotSpot' wiki some years ago, loved the coherent way it worked, and seen it bought by Google. I then tried out Twiki, which was favoured by many, but which never really captured my attention because it lacked the depth and compactness of JotSpot. More recently, I was very tempted by TiddlyWiki, which is a brilliant idea - a wiki in a downloadable web-page, where the wiki is all done in JavaScript. Very cool, very clever, and the collapse/expandability it provides for web-pages is really useful, if a little unfamiliar to most web-users. But there's a slight disadvantage to having all of the code for the wiki in the page itself - it is a big download. But then this is also solved by hosting the wiki, as per the amazingly familiar Tiddlyspot, and that's probably my current second choice.

Second choice? Yep, second. Because I've reverted to my first love: JotSpot, now in its new guise as Google Sites. Apart from a few changes that make editing easier (and less flexible), plus less ability to get 'under the hood' and admire the way that the whole thing is entirely self-consistent and wiki-d as deep as you care to go, it is the same wiki that I loved all those years ago.

And so I'm now using Google Sites to produce a few of those web projects that I had always promised to do 'when I get a spare moment', but where that moment never quite seemed to arrive. Getting back to using something that I'm still convinced is a harbinger (an 'early echo', a precursor...) for the way that web sites should and I'm sure, will be made in the future, is great fun, and wikis are a great enabler for web-sites that would be very hard to put together in plain HTML, which is how my main eponymous site is done.

So I'm now evangelising on behalf of all of those wikis that haven't been produced because others were waiting for spare moments: the time is now! Get wiki-ing!