Hunting The Muse

Wiki Blog

Notes on how I could make my weblog system more like a good thought management system:

Right now this is great for reverse chronological thoughts, but that is not the only way I think. ;-)

Some documents/entries I would want to label, revise, and refer to easily.

I believe this could be accomplished by just a few simple additions.

1. Add revision control to certain (or all) weblog entries, so people could click to see previous revisions.
2. Mark certain entries as being articles instead of weblog entries, and track these articles separately
3. Make it easier to refer to these articles using keywords and labels

The final option is the one that could be put off - it's not a big deal to just continue to manually refer to them by URL.

As for the second, I could easily accomplish this on my weblog by doing something webloggy like only using the continuation field for those weblog entries, or summaries, or certain keywords. Movable type could then be set to put them in a different category or use a different entry template for these entries. (Or they could simply use a different category.)

The first one is the hardest. I honestly don't really have much use for a wiki at this time other than wanting the revision control.

And... it looks like there isn't a revision control plugin for movable type. I'm not aware of there being one for weblogs at all, other than the one that Mark Pilgrim uses, which I don't think he's made available to the public.

So the remaining option is to install a wiki (one with a revision history feature) with some modifications. The modifications would be:

1. Be able to refer to wiki nodes that would render themselves as small html chunks rather than full pages, so they could be encapsulated within a weblog entry
2. Be able to set preferences on each node so that some could be editable by all, while others could only be editable by certain people like the author
3. Be able to write a weblog entry with a one-line php command or something that would then load and display the wiki node for display on the weblog
4. Install a movable type wiki plugin so that you could just type in a keyword/wiki-label that would then automatically link to the wiki node in question. Blosxom has something like this, not sure if movable type does. This would also be optional.

Yet another thing to look into if I had the time. Maybe some wiki expert will comment and tell me if this wiki-node-as-html-chunk is already possible?

Posted by Curt at February 2, 2004 03:24 AM