An interesting idea, at least to my mind. I think something's missing in it, though.
If it's a wiki we want, then we should just build one using existing software. User auth could just be tied to accounts on tilde.club. This would create more overhead for ~ben and ~deepend, but it would be worth it if the wiki were actually used.
I'm not convinced we need one, though. The technically-public but somewhat hidden wiki (http://tilde.club/wiki/) hasn't seen much use, it seems. It's a useful reference for some things, but I for one haven't looked at it since I first logged into tilde.club. Maybe others value it more than me.
I hear the argument in favor of a place for private-to-the-club data, but I wonder if that runs counter to the purpose of the club: to build neat webpages. Closing part of the club off just to members with a login seems to me to be a new direction that, while perhaps a path we could follow, would require deliberation.
I like the idea of a decentralized wiki, in any case. I just don't know if tilde.club is the place for it. Perhaps you might consider standing up this project on its own and soliciting it among the technical braintrust that resides here (such as it is)?
Bradley
On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, cmccabe@tilde.club wrote:
Hi tilde.club,
I’m new to tilde.club, part of the new wave of users recently. Hi everyone! I am writing partly to introduce myself and partly to see if anyone is interested in a little command line wiki project I’m toying with.
The idea is that you create html files somewhere _outside_ of your public_html directory and make them readable by others in the club group. Then contact someone else who has also done this and ask them to link to one of your files. You can then use lynx or any other command line browser to browse the wiki. It’s that simple.
For example, see my page with this command: lynx ~cmccabe/scatterWiki/index.html
If a number of people add content and link to each other, this will eventually create a decentralized, private-to-tilde.club wiki viewable only by users that are cozily logged into a shell session. How it evolves structurally is anybody’s guess.
I’m calling this scatterWiki since the wiki’s content will be scattered across users’ home directories.
By convention, I suggest creating your html files in a “scatterWiki” directory.
If you use this convention, your wiki files would be stored in: /home/yourusername/scatterWiki/yourfile.html
Why do this? Honestly there is no good reason and it is a complete waste of time. However, you still might consider it because:
You can have a little html fun that is not indexed by the Googlemonster.
This encourages one-to-one interaction among tilde.club members when requesting or giving links, and hopefully those interactions will grow.
You can learn more about how lynx or other text-based browsers work.
More time on the command line is more good.
So that’s the idea. Nothing more.
If you create a page, let me know and I’ll link to you!
cmccabe