The Blinkenshell.org main website has been running MoinMoin wiki software since the start all the way back in 2006. MoinMoin wiki software worked out very well for the site and it was popular among open source projects around the that time, but unfortunately it has not been maintained for a while. I’ve been looking for a replacement to run for some time, and I started out looking at other wiki projects since I like the idea of user/community contributed changes. I couldn’t decide on any clear choice for easy migration and simple ongoing maintenance, even if there are a few interesting choices. For example the FreeBSD project been thinking about migrating it’s MoinMoin wiki to Dokuwiki or mediawiki it seems.
After some consideration I’ve decided on a slightly different approach of using markdown formatted text files in a git repository to generate the web page instead of a classic wiki. This still lets users send in suggestions for new or updated content through forks and pull-requests in git, but since we don’t have that many updates the site is then statically generated to html files after commits in git and the web server just serves those static html directly instead of dynamic content with access to a database backend.
I feel like the new web page looks nicer and more modern, and it’s now actually usable on mobile devices. It should be simple to maintain since it’s just static files on the web server, and also easy to deploy in a redundant setup if necessary. A lot of links that were rarely ever used for the wiki functionality is now removed, which makes it less cluttered. There is still an edit link that takes you to the git repository to make/suggest changes, and I still hope there will be some user-contributed contents going forward even though it’s a bit more challenging with the fork and pull request work-flow etc. Please give it a try!
I was looking at some different static site generators, mainly markdown based ones. Material for MkDocs seemed like a popular choice, but I saw some messages that it’s going into maintenance mode and the authors have started a new project called Zensical so that’s what I ended up using. It seems like a very new project but it has all the features I require already and I hope it will be maintained for a longer time.
I hope you like the new web page! If you spot any issues please report in the chat or in the git repository 🙂
