Myles Braithwaite

Back in February I tweeted "Starting work on #Episteme today."#. A few hours latter I got the following query in an email:

From: Ivan Avery Frey
To: Myles Braithwaite
Date: Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 3:24 PM
Subject: What's Episteme???

Self-explanatory.

Episteme is a wiki engine (more of a wiki library) I am currently working on (I have actually been working on it for the last two years). It was originally a fork of Yaki (which powers The Tao of Mac), then was powered by CouchDB, and now is a fork of Hatta (not so much as a fork because I am still going to be using Hatta's WikiStorage module).

So why am I working on yet-another-wiki-engine?

• I like flat files (easy to backup using rsync).
• I think that Relation databases (like MySQL and PostgreSQL) were not design for wiki documents.
• I like storing the documents in a Revision Control System so I can edit them in a text editor.
• I like being able to search.
• I don't ware the same cloths every day why should I have to use the same markup language.

This is an example of a wiki document:

Title: Python
Tags: python, programming
Content-Type: text/x-wiki

**Python** is a dynamic programming language.

== Resources

* [[http://www.enricozini.org/2009/debian/using-python-datetime/|Tips on using python's datetime module]]
* [[http://diveintopython.org/|Dive into Python]]

I am using RFC822 (similar to an email) for meta information (title, tags, markup, date, author, etc).

Episteme will always be a work in progress and many never be released.

I ordered a second Linode (a 360) on the weekend for some PHP applications (Fever and DokuWiki). I have been with many VPS services and Linode is by far the best you can buy (shared host I will have to say Nearly Free Speech). It is hosted in the same data centre (Newark, NJ) so I have an internal IP address connecting both of them. I am running Nagios and Munin on both computers (Panda is monitoring Fox and Fox is monitoring Panda) that way if one goes down the other will notify me.

I also moved my Wiki from DokuWiki to Hatta. Hatta is a really simple wiki engine written in Python that use Mercurial for storage. Which means I just have to clone a repository to edit a page (you can clone the my draft wiki or my published wiki). I am going to miss some of the more powerful features of DokuWiki so I have started working on my own wiki engine called Episteme.

Episteme will have some of my favorite feature of DokuWiki, Hatta, Confluence, and Yaki.

Globe and Mail – Say goodbye to e-mail – wikis are bringing the workplace together

A Toronto software company uses them to plan birthday parties and next product launch.

Intel uses them to post news from the company juggling club and collaborate on top-secret computer code

A Vancouver company thinks its wiki can stem junk e-mail and global warming

Is there anything these things can’t do?

I have been checking out Yaki a really cool Wiki/Blog engine maybe by The Tao of Mac guy Rui Carmo. It is really awesome and I am thinking about using it for one of my web sites. One of my favorite things is that it is complete flat files.