Over the weekend I upgraded my wiki to MoinMoin 1.6.2.

I also finally installed modwsgi. This is what the cool kids use run their Python web apps with these days. Unlike modpython which runs a Python interpreter in each Apache instance and chews up lots of memory, modwsgi launches separate daemons to handle MoinMoin’s Python requests. And a bonus is these daemons can run as any user, no longer are my wiki files owned by the Apache user. Was easy to set up too.

MoinMoin has many powerful features in addition to just normal wiki collborative editing:

• A GUI editor: for those who can’t be bothered with wiki syntax.
• Also supports WikiCreole. The new “common-tounge” wiki syntax.
• Wiki synchronization: I can work offline on my laptop and sync it up later.
• Access Control: Yes there’s parts of my wiki which are private.
• With ACLs I can limit the actions of different users/groups on certain pages or a whole hierarchy of pages.
• Themeable: You might notice my theme is quite different to the default MoinMoin theme.
• Several antispam measures (BadContent, timeouts, captchas, host blocking). Spam hasn’t been a problem.
• Hideable inline comments and discussion subpages. I’m not using these, but they are very important for some users.
• A large number of built in macros, with more macros available from the MacroMarket
• and it is easy to code your own Macros if you know a little bit of Python.
• Pluggable authentication methods: planning to change to a WordPress/MoinMoin single-sign-on.
• Wiki Farms: managing a group of MoinMoin wikis with common configuration.
• Smilies : planning to standardize my WordPress and MoinMoin smilies.
• Syntax highlighting: for code.
• PDF creation.
• Email notification of wiki changes
• and more

With its access controls and macros MoinMoin almost crosses over into being a content management system. My ToDo list is a very simple example of using the FullSearch and NewPage macros to create a task tracker.

MoinMoin is used for some very popular wikis: Apache, Brewiki, Skype, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gnome, Xen, Bazaar, Mercurial.

MoinMoin is though somewhat overshadowed by the MediaWiki engine. MediaWiki is designed specifically for running Wikipedia, whereas MoinMoin is more flexible and general purpose, but isn’t going to be great at hosting multi-terabytes of extremely popular data.

There’s so many different wiki engines now, there is a WikiMatrix tool which lets you compare them side by side. Checkboxes of course can’t tell you everything. And I’m not sure their choice of checkboxes is completely unbiased.

I’ve tidied up the LinuxSoftware Wiki a bit.  With content there going back 8 years it’s got out of date and crufty in many places.  Mostly I use it as a back up to my brain, but it is a shared community resource, anyone is welcome to edit and use the tips and hints there.  Of course I delete the spam (not much of that recently though).

Caught up with Tim at Wok’n'Noodle. Had the always delicious Thai Style Vegetarian Noodles. (With tofu, cabbage, carrot, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, bok choi and spring onion).

Tim has been looking at setting up a website. I’ve sold him on how cool SliceHost is. Yes it is more expensive than just a virtual domain, but it is great to have complete control over the whole operating system, and good learning too.

I’ve done my bit for the Fedora project too. Tim is also going to run Fedora 8 as well, that way we are both talking the same language (rpm, yum, service, /etc/sysconfig).

I demo’ed the SliceManager and answered how to do a few things with yum.
Q: How do you update the distro with yum?
A: “yum update”

Q: How do you search for a package with yum?
A: “yum search packagename”

Q: How do you see all the packages which are installed?
A: “rpm -qa”

Q: How do you see all the files which were installed with a package?
A: “rpm -qil packagename”

I think he’ll find it very easy.

I gave him a couple of hints about how I secure my systems too, but I don’t think I’ll blog those .

Dear readers

It’s a shock, but it seems I have readers. “Give us more posts about Oliver, like the one from last Saturday” they demand. Well OK I’ll do another post on my cat sometime this week. I owe my niece some photos of him as well. “and fix the tabs for IE7 too” they cry. OK I’ll have a look at that too.

Strange noises

I didn’t sleep that well last night, but tonight it is cooler and am hoping to get more restful zzzs. It wasn’t just a problem with the heat, but having the windows open makes every little sound seem like it is coming from within the flat. I was sure I heard someone moving around about 12, and then at 3am there was someone softly calling “Amy, Amy” and the sound of someone stumbling around. But in both cases, there was no one in my flat or in my yard, so I went back to sleep. So, if you’re breaking into a place, just call out “Amy, Amy, I’ve lost my keys” and everyone will figure there’s nothing sinister about your activities.

Happy Birthday Roger

I’m just back from Roger’s Birthday BBQ. Ate a very nice meal cooked on Rogers huge brand new BBQ and watched his kittens catch an devour a couple of baby birds. Mostly it was just Ginger, the other kitten Patch wasn’t quite so blood thirsty. “Dinner and a show”. Caught up with the others from New Years and swapped blister stories.

Yes OK, more about Oliver soon.

Well sort-of work. I had said I didn’t care how this website looked with Internet Exploder, but when I saw it couldn’t even display the tabs making it impossible to navigate I decided I had to get at least them working. That’s 3 hours gone, but at least the tabs now work.

IE6 is crap to work with, but in the end I discovered just two main problems. One was a supposed workaround which for IE which was much more destructive than helpful and the other was IE didn’t like me limiting the size of the tabs as the text is enlarged. I deleted the work around (I’ve forgotten exactly what it was), and instead of setting height on the tabs I set min-height which IE just ignores.

So now although it may not be pretty, this site should be at least navigable in IE6. But why bother??? Do yourself a favour and get a decent up to date browser like Firefox!

I don’t know if anyone else cares, but the banner will now span any width you stretch it to. The trick is I have a matching background image extending off to the right of the main banner image. It’s not perfectly seamless, but I think it looks nicer than just cutting off the banner at 1680px.