The Code
This page is being written using the following software:
- pwk.py - Allows editing of the pages from IRC/HTTP.
- pwkblog.py - Allows posting to the RSS feed from IRC/HTTP.
The Explanation
The word "pwk" is diminutive of "pwyky", which is some old wiki software that I wrote in Python back in 2004-01.
The pwk.py code on inamidst.com (this is going to get a bit circular...) is invoked by a small wrapper CGI on miscoranda, which is where the live wiki resides. That then has two interfaces: IRC, and Web. At the moment, I'm typing this document using the IRC interface. The IRC interface is going to be hosted by phenny, who's a bot running on Vorpal, the machine which serves inamidst.com and miscoranda.com; and she'll be writing live to miscoranda, using the pwk.py script that's housed at inamidst.com—it's all the same filesystem. Of course, if I want to make changes or move stuff about, I can use the Web interface; the IRC interface only lets me append text serially.
Now, I have two requirements:
- a) that I have an up-to-date local copy of inamidst.com
- b) that inamidst.com itself be static
That's why I'm not editing the wiki straight to inamidst.com, as would be most logical. Instead, @@ I have a Makefile which copies the files over for me to my local server, which I can then rsync back to inamidst.com.
The downside is that that's a lot of rsyncing and redundancy, for a lot of complexity too. The upside is that it meets all my requirements, redundancy is good, and that the code is actually pretty straightforward. And the plan seems to work!
Inspiration
The inspiration for this has in part come from crschmidt's revival of my old noets code. @@ Write the noets page. The problem I've found with IRC only editing is that it really is not good for anything other than appending, so I figured that if I allowed a Web interface too, that'd provide the best of both worlds.
And since I'm using the pwyky formatting, I've got a lot better wiki text options than in noets (pwyky is descended from noets, through hwiki).
@@ Note about pwk pronunciation?
More advantages over noets:
- It lets you edit a single topic over a longer time period.
Er, okay, I only thought of one more.
Origin of the name:
[05:41] <sbp> heh, I might call it pwk.py [05:41] <d8uv> Hehe
@@ Write more about pwk here; link to pwkblog.py and such.