Friday 10 February 2006

PBWiki perfect for online notebook

Several times in the last year I was looking for appropriate wiki engine. I wanted to have a wiki web page .

I used some free wiki farms before and played with ''simple'' free wikis .
But it sucked.
After a while I wouldn't have passion to return and write wikis. Even Wikipedia engine was too cluttered for my taste.

Then I had stumble onto something called PBWiki. Immediatly I fell in love with the simplicity and control I have over my wiki under choosen subdomain.
Bonus – it had password protection. Now, that was killer for my taste. See PBWiki FAQ to understand my passion more.

Although before I have allways had a goal to use wiki with other contributors as a community resource, this time was different and I felt I could use it for my simple personal organizer and online notebook.

It felt right for the first time. Nothing to get killed or bored ;) Simple interface, simple navigation. Search function works fine.

I allways had a attitude that wikis are ugly and not for the average users. Mostly, that's mainstream view and it's probably true.
If they are not ugly, they are too geeky. If they are not geeky, they are feature-rich and user is very often lost .

PBWiki changed the view I had.

Today, I am using PBwiki to add and sort blog posts , newspaper articles or, most often, articles I do not publish somewhere else.
It's simple my writing portfolio and it's there for future reference.

It's my organizer of writing portfolio defined by categories related to web and internet techonologies and essays about social impact of these technologies.
For my eyes only.

Moreover, I organized in the sidebar all my links I need in my daily surfing habits. These are all web related links to the stuff I use and do on the web: like my blogs, contributor Ids, rss, wiki, chat, forums, VOIP, bookmarks, podcasts, photo sharing, web analytics, hosting. It looks nice in the sidebar.

Other parts of my PBWiki are pages created to fill in my writings. There's one box commited to generation of random ideas. Just like in normal notebook.

It's simple and useful. But , please, don't edit your wiki in a hungry mood. They have a sandwich logo for PBWiki and even copywrite sentence ''wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich''.

They have a FAQ and tour to take and it'll explain in more detail.

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