Richard’s wholly unimaginative blog

So, I’ve been pretty happy with Oddmuse. It was simple, very easy to install, very much a Wiki, but also had quite a number of modules that could be used to customize it. So all in all, I like Oddmuse. However, when trying to run it on my webhost, I’ve encountered more problems than I knew could exist. After struggling with it for a couple of days, I decided to give some other Wikis a try. Unfortunately, it seems that Oddmuse is addictive and all these fancy Wikis are just distasteful to me now. Not being able to run Oddmuse, I instead turned to Usemod, from which Oddmuse forked. The look is great, being pretty much the same as Oddmuse, and it has most of the features available for Oddmuse.

However, I’m getting increasingly frustrated with how difficult customizing it is. It’s one Perl script and any extensions are done using the tried and true method of patching. While a little too hackish for my tastes, that’s fine. However, what I hate is that most patches seem to be written for an older version, so I have to manually edit the script and hope things work :\

I don’t know, I’m torn between installing something like DokuWiki which is customizable, fancy, has many plugins available, etc., and UseMod, which seems to be very true to the ideals behind Wikis and appeals to my hacker side.

It seems like Oddmuse was indeed a good choice, since there exists a module that converts CamelCase to Camel Case when the links are displayed. So, in effect, I get the best of both worlds. I have Accidental Linking without having to see things like TownOfArpet.

I’ve decided to try to organize my various hand-written notes and text files related to the D&D campaign I’m running on a Wiki. I’ve set up a nice little Oddmuse Wiki, which was relatively painless and seems to offer the right mix of features.

So far I have two problems. One is that including various images is rather painful and not very pretty, as each image either needs to be uploaded to a web server (perhaps something like Flickr will be useful here) to be inlined or uploaded and made into a WikiPage. I’m going to take a look at the bloated MediaWiki beast and see if the name implies some sort of advanced alternate media handling.

The other problem is, and likely only because I’m myself and like to fuss about the details, is the choice between Free Links and CamelCase. It seems like both have their pros and cons and there is no clear winner, it seems. Most Wikis, as far as I know, now prefer to use the Free Links, but that doesn’t mean I have to follow that trend. The main reason I like CamelCase is AccidentalLinking, which is one of the reasons I went with a Wiki to begin with. On the other hand, the single word and apostrophe problems might be significant. I think for the time being I’m going to try to use CamelCase whenever possible and only use Free Links when absolutely necessary (such as when dealing with apostrophes in names like O’Reilly or acronyms).

I’m hoping this will help me be more organized and will make it easier to find stuff.