Wiki Server

Last weekend, I set up a personal wiki server on our home network. It was necessary to try a few different approaches before I found one that worked well, but I settled on using WAMP5 and MediaWiki.

Now, I've set up WAMP installs before by hand - install MySQL, install Apache, install PHP, pull out hair - but often they didn't quite work right because I didn't know the correct way to configure it. Poring through config files for hours looking for the one magic option that will fix everything is not my idea of a good time, so I wanted something with less hassle. WAMP5 delivered on that front, as all I had to do was click "next" a few times and everything was ready to go. Nicely done.

MediaWiki was nearly as easy. I did need to create a new MySQL user using PhpMyAdmin (included with WAMP5), but other than that it seemed fairly easy to install. Overall, I think it's a great (almost-) turnkey solution. In fact, unless you want to do extreme server customization with Apache and PHP, I would recommend WAMP5 as a default.

Right now, the wiki is kind of novel, so I'll wait a little while before writing about it. I do like the "edit" links on every section, though.