Cogito Ergo Wiki

For your entertainment and delectation, I offer up a small write-up in which I muse about complexity and simplicity in the tools we choose to inflict upon our project partners.

A short excerpt:

I think that WikiMedia is a relatively terrible thing to inflict upon unsuspecting project partners who are already stressed out by the weird idea that they should contribute documentation to your project, that they might actually be asked to actually write something

Wiki Wondering: Share and enjoy.

JSPWiki

I think JSPWiki is one of the greatest pieces of open source software out there anywhere.  It might not be well suited to everytone running a small website on a shared host because it requires a Java servlet container for hosting, so demands a slightly higher level of expertise than the PHP junk that's out there.

That said, it drops into place and "just works" for a fast tryout or evaluation.  At the same time most of the flexibility needed for large-scale, sysadmin-run deployments is easily available, and its not an "all in one big step" thing either: you can gradually add the finer-grained controls as you need them.  Any Java-capable sysadmin will have no difficulty.

Furthermore, there is an active, healthy and, above all, friendly developer community.

I am using JSPWiki to run the "static" content side of this website, with only myself allowed to create, delete and edit pages.  (Indeed, only I am allowed to log in!)  Its perfect for the task.  All I have to do now is hack the templates into something nicer to look at. :-)