Once your wiki’s an essential part of your digital information store, you’ll want to take advantage of it as much as possible. Here are some advanced Instiki usage tips and tricks.
Roll back changes: Make an edit to a page that you regret later? Here’s the beauty of the wiki: Every version of every page is available to view, compare against the current version, and restore. To roll back a page to a past state, click “See changes.” Using the “Back in time” and “Forward in time” links, locate the version you want to restore and click the “Rollback” link.
View your wiki index: Keeping track of all the pages you’ve created in your wiki isn’t an easy task, especially if you’ve linked them from subpages several layers in from the home page. Luckily, Instiki does it for you. Click the All Pages link at the top of any page to view an alphabetical list of pages in your wiki on the left; on the right, you can view a list of “orphaned pages”—that is, any pages that have no reference via a wiki word elsewhere.
Export your wiki pages: Instiki can export a copy of your entire wiki as a set of interlinked web pages or as Textile markup for importing into another wiki package. To do so, click the “Export” link to the left of the search box and click either HTML or Markup to download a zip file of your wiki’s pages in the respective format. This is the perfect way to back up your wiki data into a read-only format on a thumb drive or CD.
The hosted service PBwiki (http://pbwiki.com) is the perfect way to test your wiki legs without installing anything on your computer. Register at PBwiki and you’ll get a full-featured wiki with unlimited pages, 10MB of space to upload files and attachments, page comments, and an optional wiki password for access control. A free PBwiki option is available, with paid upgrades for extra features like backup, advertisement-free pages, traffic statistics, lockable pages, and a custom domain.
Advanced users who want the features of the granddaddy of all wikis, Wikipedia, can install the software that runs the online encyclopedia, MediaWiki (http://mediawiki.org). MediaWiki is a free, open-source wiki package that requires considerably more setup time but offers advanced configuration options and features, including user registration and login, page discussion, reverse page links, more text formatting options, design customization, and file uploads. To run MediaWiki, you need the PHP programming language engine and the MySQL database server installed on your computer—both are free but are aimed at developers, not casual users. Also, you have to manually edit a PHP file in order to start MediaWiki. Many affordable website hosting packages come with PHP and MySQL for installing software like MediaWiki—or might even come with MediaWiki preinstalled. The advantage of installing MediaWiki on your web host is that you can access it from any Internet-connected computer.
Gina Trapani is the founding editor of Lifehacker.com and author of Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day (Wiley, 2006).
Comments are closed on this article
Strongbad536
October 31, 2007 at 6:31am
I'm trying to set this up, and after I type "instiki.cmd", I get this error
http://s12.photobucket.com/albums/a223/Strongbad536/?action=view¤t=instikierror.jpg
copy and paste into address bar (if you didn't know)
chris.peplin
October 05, 2007 at 3:33pm
I use a TiddlyWiki to achieve the same thing. ccTiddlyWiki is a version that can be installed to a webserver and accessed remotely. It's very slick and easy to use.
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