MDwiki – Markdown based wiki done 100% on the client via JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

MDwiki – Markdown based wiki done 100% on the client via JavaScript

dynalon.github.io

73 pointshilbert-23 comments

TLDR; Not actually a wiki. This is a nice front end js component that live autocompiles markdown into HTML.

IMHO to be a wiki it would need to manage user editing and version control.

Author of MDwiki here. Versioning and editing is indeed intended to be done and handled through git. Pull requests are prefered method for collaboration. Another way is to place the wiki on a Dropbox shared public folder and share the folder with your collaborators. Hosting can be done through Dropbox as well.

In that case, I just came up with some awesome new minimalist wiki software: it's called 'plain text files in a git repository'.

I had the same thought as the parent of your comment, but I really like this way of doing things, well done. Looks really clean and I'd consider using it if I needed a wiki for some project.

Seems like hosting it on GitHub Pages would accomplish that.

Wikis are editable live, usually by anybody; but I cannot see a way to edit any of these projects that use MDwiki. So if that is the case, this isn't a wiki project, and why is it called one?

Seems they're using "wiki" and "knowledge base" interchangeably.

A pull request would edit a page, I think.

But that doesn't make it a wiki.

Au contraire, I think GitHub's editing features are actually close enough to make a wiki.

Though... you might as well just use GitHub's Wiki...

What.. a "wiki" that isn't shared? (I can see it could be made to have server component, I like the idea of doing all rendering on client-side, why not?!) The rendering is unfortunately glitchy (FF30; sometimes the CSS seems to drop during load/link clicks) and the stack of various libraries used is so deep that it may well be difficult to find the cause? Sorry, that's presumptuous actually, but I sometimes wonder why small projects like this need this many libs:

    marked
    jQuery
    Bootstrap
    Bootswatch
    colorbox
    highlightjs

TiddlyWiki, the original self-contained wiki (and now nearly 10 years old), was (is?) often used for note-taking. All you need is a browser, point it at a file:/// URI and you could save your changes locally.

http://tiddlywiki.com/

That's really cool! It reminded me of Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki, which is mostly client-side too; although it normally uses sinatra, there's an arduino port and I seem to recall an experimental server implemented using only apache conf hacks too.

https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki

If anyone wants a python implementation, I have recently found MarkWiki[0] to be quite excellent. It's simple to use - I deployed it within a small team, all familiar with markdown.

[0] : http://pythonhosted.org/MarkWiki/

This is similar to what we are building at UserDeck. We call it Guides and it is a knowledge base widget that embeds inline into any page of a website. It is all Javascript and customizable on the client side with layouts and components which have options which let you change things like a sidebar component to the right side instead of the left.

Any team member can collaborate and edit articles live on the site and we are considering adding wiki type functionality if people are interested.

You can learn more at http://userdeck.com/guides.

And how is the crawling of search bots handled? Does Google render this into HTML and interpret the hyperlinks and try to crawl deeper pages as well?

Crawling is an issue. But if you google for mdwiki, first result will be the projects website which IS crawled. I think this is undocumented by google, but they do fetch ajax content. But you can not do professional SEO with frontend-only solutions.

When I reload the page in Firefox 30, I first see the non-styled content, which is a bit jarring.

AFAICT, this entirely runs on the client. The server just serves some static web pages. Presumably, if you save the static HTML / js / css files onto your laptop, you could use the wiki when you're offline.

I like JS and all that but having to wait for the css to load is not great UX.

This is interesting. It would allow me to make quick work of all the markdown files I have to get them alive. +1.

Also check out http://slimwiki.com

is it possible to get pretty URLs? that might be the one thing that might stop me from using this -- this is exactly what i have been looking for!

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