BlogKi

December 13, 2006
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ClWiki


This site runs my frankensteinian wiki, ClWiki [github]. It was originally written in the early days of Ruby, on 1.6, when camelCasing was still the norm. It's pretty much a disaster, but a functional one. I never really wanted a blog, as I tend to be more into collecting tidbits from others around topics I care about, rather than writing my own material. A wiki fits that better, but I still wanted a blog look-and-feel. Previously these were sort of two separate bits (the blog part being called BlogKi - Martin Fowler has a Bliki, I have a Blogki - my name's more Russian and macho sounding), but now there's no real separation at all.

After my old host started sending my machine to pasture towards the end of 2012, I decided to update it all for Rails 4 as an engine, which the cLabs site (also Rails 4) mounts. It's worked rather well, and been a little bit of a learning experience along the way. (Notes for future posts: SmartQuoteRendering, PageChangeWithTurbolinks, BinRailsAndBundler, Rails4EngineRoutes).

While I was at it, I ripped out some feature warts, like CVS support and WikiFullHierarchy, a failed attempt at supporting a file-system like directory structure. The feature worked, it just didn't prove itself worthwhile. More hassle than benefit. And deleting code is fun.

It still has the same lack of markup support, even in a day where markdown seems to be everywhere, and is backed by simple file storage, though I did finally cave to not having any metadata by adding a modified date into the files since with the new deployment fu, relying on File.mtime wasn't possible.

The old cLabs.org had some static content which has mostly been merged here (mostly CLabsScrapware and TheCaseForXP).