Wiki Closed for Remodeling

Wiki has endured a number of abuses mostly protected by the goodwill of an obscure community for whom I have tremendous respect: wiki's authors. Here I describe what I will do to protect their investment for decades to come.

Wiki served dynamic user-generated content before that was a well understood discipline. We've been developing replacement technology that is as cutting-edge today as perl and cgi were then. Google federated wiki and read around. You will find this wiki's missing pages.

I had hoped that a distributed community would form that would carry forward and improve the original wiki beyond my lifetime, maybe forever. It could still happen. I'll keep working on it. But some simpler transition is needed.

We've had some interesting experience with a javascript reader for static json federated wiki pages. You may be using it now. I will step back from that forward looking work for something much simpler: translating server-side perl to client-side javascript.

The database is proving to be the difficult part. Modern tooling chokes on the mix of character encodings that have accumulated since we went live in 1995 well before UTF-8 became popular. I've resorted to writing 1975 style getchar() style programs to make some conversions.

So why close? It gives me room to work. The continuous scraping bumps up against my web throttling making all other web services useless. Even shell is painfully slow.

Of course I live in a world of many options. I could be stalled just reviewing choices. Instead I build on what I've learned from federated wiki so as to preserve the original wiki in a form that can be appreciated for what it has been and will ever be. If you want to help. Learn some federated wiki. Then email me.