While scrutiny and interest in “Rails”:http://www.rubyonrails.org is currently the flamefest du jour among the _my language/framework is greater than your language/framework_ cabal, another Ruby project that has garnered acclaim and considerably less controversy has to be “Instiki”:http://www.instiki.org, a Ruby-based wiki. It is the easiest, most elegant and least annoying wiki I have installed and it comes with different formatting plugins like markdown and “textile”:http://hobix.com/textile/quick.html (my personal favorite) that makes writing much less painful than using plain HTML. In fact, I was taken with writing in textile so much, I now use it to write in the _blog_. More to the point and where it counts, I’m still using instiki everyday, nearly two months after the initial installation to document my thoughts and hold anything of interest I find on the web that doesn’t fit “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us or the blog.
There are, however, a couple of side-effects that are a direct byproduct of instiki’s ease of use. Instiki is extremely easy to install because it creates its own simple web server; no outside configuration, a simple command line startup (or double-click the instiki.app in OSX), no mess. This, however (as far as I know), makes it difficult for instiki play nice with any existing apache installations. Which means you can’t run instiki as an apache handler to a particular folder off your main site.
This is cumbersome only if you want to be able to access your instiki installation from the real world outside of your home router. My workaround is to run your local instiki with a changed port for security and grab a dynamic dns name from the venerable “dyndns”:http://www.dyndns.org. Then you can access your instiki box using [yourspecialname].dyndns.org:[changed port number] from anywhere.
What I would love to be able to do next with instiki is use it directly as a blogging tool, with the ability to import or export entries from other well known CMSes. However, the greatest thing about it right now is its utter simplicity; if any changes to the project were to detract from that singular feature, I would say it’s better to leave great enough alone.
