The past

Back in 1998 or so,  or long after I’d switched for system administrator to web developer, I stumbled across Ward Cunningham’s original WikiWiki. It was, at the time, a mind-blowing idea: a website that people could edit and extend themselves, without any programming at all. Simply sign in to the wiki, and start editing. Adding a specially-formatted word automatically generated a link to another page, either an existing one…or a brand new one, that you could start expanding on yourself.

I can’t say that I conceived of Wikipedia when I saw this, but I absolutely zeroed in on how we could use it for several problems we had:

• We didn’t have a bug tracker/project tracker for our project. With a wiki, we could just have a page that linked to all of the features we were working on and the bugs we were fixing.
• We didn’t have a formal release process at all, or much in the way of source control. We started using RCS and noting the version number(s) of files that fixed bugs. We still had to build up a canonical checkout of everything, but we at least had some tracking that way.
• We really wanted (and needed) an easy way to build a reference manual for our users that was easy or them to browse and search, and easy for us to keep up to date.

We (okay, I) decided to try a wiki. The original WikiWiki didn’t have a number of features we really felt like we needed for this to work: no authorized users and no access control being the big issues. I found WebWeb, original written by (I will have to look at the WebWebX source!), which had part of, but not all of what I needed, and with their permission, I created an extended version, rather unimaginatively called WebWebX.

The present

RadioSpiral has a lot of stuff that we need to have documented: how to connect to the streams, configs, where Spud lives and how to reboot him, policies, etc., and it’d be nice to have all that in a wiki instead of in documents (our last update of our docs was 5 years ago!). I remembered that we’d had a private Notion instance at ZipRecruiter — it wasn’t great, but it was usable, and private. So I signed up for Notion…and discovered for a mere $720 a year, I could have the level of support that included a private wiki.

Given that RadioSpiral’s income is in the red at all times — it’s 100% a labor of love, and a place for us to have fun while playing good music — that was just not a tenable solution. I didn’t want to run the old Zip wiki either — it was written in Haskell, and I didn’t feel like learning a whole new programming paradigm just to get a private wiki.

The I remembered, well, I have the old WebWebX source out there, and it did have access control. Maybe I could get it running again, and modernize it in the process. I’ve pulled the source from ibiblio and started working on the conversion. First things first, I’ve installed Dist::Zilla so I can build it out in some kind of reasonable fashion, and I’ve decided to base the whole thing on Mojolicious to try to make it as self-contained as possible.

My goal is a private wiki that can be deployed with a dead minimum of effort. Which will probably entail a lot of effort to write and fix up, but that’s time better spent than trying to find a free alternative somewhere that I’ll have to accept compromises in, or yet another paid service that I’ll have to pay for myself.

So far, I’ve created the initial README.md, initialized Dist::Zilla in the new App::WebWebXNG repo, and imported the old code into the repo to start work. I’m choosing to implement the main program as a modulino, to make it easy to test (did I mention that the old code has exactly zero tests?).

Updates to follow!