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Comment by 3dfan | Hacker News Reader

We have a directory lessons_learned/ with *.md files.

It's a git repo and everyone can pull/push directly to master.

I skim the commits once a week.

It's basically plain text files. But the md extension triggers some nice eye candy in vim and other browsers.

I think we will keep this structure forever. Maybe we will (additionally) serve the files over http at some point. Maybe we might even add edit / search / push functions over http, but for now I have not planned that.

I have seen CMS come and go. And I'm tired of it. Text files are forever.

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> I have seen CMS come and go. And I'm tired of it. Text files are forever.

My website uses a "Apache-DirectoryListing"-like asp.net core frontend + a backend markdown parser.

If I weren't that lazy, I'm pretty sure I could have written a module for apache or nginx with an integrated md parser. Maybe there is something already.

Might be a good job for Caddy Server.

Oh, that's cool! Thanks! I just skimmed through the docs, and the markdown stuff looks promising. Maybe I'll switch over to Caddy.

We push text files into our git repo, that is hosted on a local GitLab. Gives us the nice visuals, with good support for inline code/xml/data/whatever, and searchability, and you can add new files, or edit existing ones, directly in the WebUI

That is a great solution. I love markdown. Have you considered putting the directory under version control (git)? That way you can track changes and easily recover sections you remove and regret later. I have an entire github repository for "tips".

I think it was Karl Browman from the rstats community that noted: Your closest collaborator is you, six months from now. And you don't respond to email...

This sounds really interesting. Do you mind if I ask how it is organized? One of the problems I have with our wiki is that some of this information exists, but I have no way to find it because the search feature sucks, and every person writing something has a different way of organizing/thinking about it.

I'm not 3dfan, but it sounds like their methodology avoids being too organized to lower the barrier to writing these things. The cool thing about simple text files is that you can get superb search with grep and similar tools. The git repo also seems more approachable than having to use a website interface.

It is simply evolving.

For example when the graphics person wants to save something for the first time, they might make a new file graphics.txt and put in the information they want to keep there.

If they then continue to just grow that one file, all is fine. If they feel the need to have multiple files, I advice them to make a subfolder graphics/ and have their files there.

Search is simply done via grep.

So to see if someone wrote something about logos, we typically do:

    grep -ir --color logo *

I mostly agree with sentiment and I think this is a very pragmatic approach.

But... sometimes a picture or two would help a lot. Is everything done in ASCII-art or do you also commit JPG/GIF files there?

So far the need to store images in this folder did not come up.

Can you give a use case?

Look at gollum for a wiki that works exactly like that. Might give you a nice web frontend with linking over the repository you already have.

This is a really cool idea. Thanks for the inspiration.

What company do you work for? That sounds awesome.

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