Tuesday, June 17, 2008

A Huge, Ever-growing Brain That Rules From the Center of the Ultrawiki

I got a tip a while back from Rich to set up a wiki for personal/family use. Use the magic of Web 2.0 to run your life. I finally got around to doing it a little while back. My web host makes it really easy to set up MediaWiki, the software that powers the ever-more-awesome Wikipedia.

I've taken to using it more and more as I get used to it. Some stuff that used to go in my little now goes in there on a scratch page. I'm probably going to buy some glasses online soon, so I have a wiki page to track candidate frames. We have a page of home improvement projects, both completed (for reference at sale time) and TODO. I keep track of URLs that I discover at work that the censor proxy won't let me see, as well as URLs I discover at home that would be more easily read at home.

At some point in the future, we're going to move to a new house and buy a new car, so I've compiled a list of notes on both as I think of criteria and candidates. I've started tracking books I've read* on there as well. We'll probably start a page of movies to see, with indicators for movies we both want to see and ones just one of us wants to see. I won't link to it right now because some of the pages are private, and I haven't gotten around to fine-tuning the permissions settings.

That's just the list of things I've been putting in it for the last few months. It's handy because it's accessible from nearly anywhere, while also being easy to use and reliable; Dreamhost does daily backups for me. If you don't have a web host already, or don't have one that easily supports a wiki, or just don't want to bother, there are hosted solutions out there, like Google Sites (formerly JotSpot) and PB Wiki. You can see a more complete list of options at Wikipedia, in a nice little bit of circularity. Give it a shot; it'll change your life (if only a little bit).

* Still planning on posting here, but until I do, I need to record them somewhere.

PS - unembeddable reference

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1 Comments:

Blogger Rich said...

Most excellent. We love ours.

In addition to some of the stuff you mentioned, we also find it useful for recipes (so they are tweakable and trackable), service people (when you need em, you need em), medical info, a log of CSR dealings, digital gift cards, etc etc.

Looking at it now, it looks like it's time to prune some old stuff from mine...

June 17, 2008 at 1:01 PM  

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