Home
This is my experience on creating and using a personal wiki.
Why
This all started when I read a story about an IT admin using a wiki to document their IT infrastructure and having it on a USB for the next person.
At the time I already documented things but usually in separate folders and I sometimes run into files randomly and realised I could of really used them when I tried to do something else and not search all over the internet again. Documents were usually organised by project and once I stopped working on a project, I ended up forgetting the transferable information and even duplicating it in another document. This is not including the Trello, paper and google keep notes I also used. A bit annoying when you come across notes you could of used earlier.
So this seemed like the ideal solution. Centralising all that information so it can be easily found later when dealing with similar issues. Later I found out I could attach files directly, have version control, and all sorts of other nice features.
I was debating the private vs online wiki for a bit but decided on private. Purely being so I could make notes on things and include more sensitive information, nothing crazy but things like network configurations, backup setting files and backup firmware images etc.
Keeping it private would avoid the pitfalls of re-hosting or accidentally publishing things I would rather not or not have permission to do so.
Also I do tend to copy and paste a lot, I reference to the original content but with the internet being what it is, you can’t guarantee the site would still be up next week. so its nice to have a backup of the relevant info.
I’ll leave you with a quote that gets me in the mood to write documentation:
“Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down” - From the Mythbusters TV show
How I built it up
- First I centralised all the info I had laying around in various spots
- I tried to make the homepage a comprehensive top level links (Still a work in progress), then navigate to the subtopics
- I then attached relevant files to the subtopics but I did try to reword them to a wiki style if I had time but kept the legacy files for reference
- I placed TODOs in places where I knew information was missing so when I come back I know where there is information and fill it in as I work in a specific area
What I use
I use zim for my wiki. It comes with an bunch of useful features and the directory structure is just a series of markdown files so if I did decide to move to another piece of software it would be easy.
Here are some plugin features I use:
- Git source control build in with automatic versioning
- Spell check
- Attaching documents
- Bookmarks
Note: Most Plugins come with the software but need to be enabled others may need an additional library
Extra: It also has a webserver option but I personally don’t use it
Links
Here is a link to zim and others so you can compare, setup is fairly straight forward but check the website pages for more information.
What I use:
Checkout some others:
- DokuWiki
- Wikipedia entry for wikisoftware has lots listed