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What I proposed, but haven't had time to get completely working (although I am close), is a static site generator. I chose Eleventy (aka 11ty) which is popular, one of the better options in that category. (I have a blank site set up, and I have a remix of the CSS + boiler plate of our current web site: I need to combine those two.
One idea is to have a main web site plus another separate site, ideally using the same mechanism.
A static site generator like this is somewhat close to a wiki, except that creating new pages is creating a text file, usually markdown but could be html or various template alternatives, then triggering (probably automatically) a 'build' that produces the resulting HTML+CSS web site. The advantage of this over a traditional wiki is that the latter requires a database (or files) drive web app that is generating the actual pages on the fly. This is slower and less scalable, but does have some nice aspects. I'm not against having a traditional wiki, but static site generator based websites are nice for several reasons.
The work flow is generally to just add a single text file in articles/my-article.md or myblog/20260429-How-I-Fixed-It.md or similar. With github + 11ty, we would have a git hook to auto-build the site.
Looking more closely for the crossover of SSGs vs wikis, I find this:
https://github.com/wikibonsai/wikibonsai
This is an example wiki-like site using that:
https://github.com/wikibonsai/garden-beds
This is an example page:
https://github.com/wikibonsai/garden-beds/blob/main/agent/foundation/entries/causality.md
With an image:
https://github.com/wikibonsai/garden-beds/blob/main/minima/bonsai/entries/bonsai.md
It does work with 11ty, and in a number of other configurations. Mainly, this adds wiki syntax for linking to pages: [[topic name]].
There have been ways to allow direct web editing of files in git. Something like that might work here, which would make for a much more complete Wiki experience.
There are some other interesting options that work in a similar way:
This says that it converts md to wiki pages, but also has edit.
https://github.com/Linbreux/wikmd
Stephen
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I wonder if one of the AIs could scrape our mailing list and condense it into an organized, summarized trove of HBRC wisdom?
James H Phelan "Nihil est sine ratione cur potius sit quam non sit" Leibniz
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On Apr 29, 2026, at 5:37 PM, 'Stephen Williams' via HomeBrew Robotics Club <hbrob...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
What I proposed, but haven't had time to get completely working (although I am close), is a static site generator. I chose Eleventy (aka 11ty) which is popular, one of the better options in that category. (I have a blank site set up, and I have a remix of the CSS + boiler plate of our current web site: I need to combine those two.
One idea is to have a main web site plus another separate site, ideally using the same mechanism...
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On Apr 29, 2026, at 8:20 PM, Stephen Williams <s...@lig.net> wrote:
On 4/29/26 7:37 PM, Chris Albertson wrote:
Whether a wiki or static file generator. The idea is that anyone can post things like their projects. They just add it to the Wiki.
Authoring content as Markdown files is generally accepted as best for everyone for this kind of thing.
I think the way to decide which software to use is to find the least computer-literate person you know to try and use the candidate software. Whatever it turns out he can figure out, use that. It has to be easy enough that anyone can add pages with no knowledge of “web stuff”. If it takes even 20 minutes of study, it will not be used.
The biggest decision is to decide if we are OK being github based or not. There are situations where even github is too much friction, headache. Most of us have been assuming at least is fine for us. Google Drive, s3fs mounts of an S3 service are some other possibilities.
Here is a popular open-source wiki that does not use a database. https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki
But the reason for using a DBMS is for atomic operations. DBMSes are good at locking.
Git provides the equivalent of that function. Also, when adding new content as new files, not typically an issue.
The other solution that avoids locking issues is live editing, like Google Docs.
Stephen
On Apr 29, 2026, at 5:37 PM, 'Stephen Williams' via HomeBrew Robotics Club <hbrob...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
What I proposed, but haven't had time to get completely working (although I am close), is a static site generator. I chose Eleventy (aka 11ty) which is popular, one of the better options in that category. (I have a blank site set up, and I have a remix of the CSS + boiler plate of our current web site: I need to combine those two.
One idea is to have a main web site plus another separate site, ideally using the same mechanism...
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Miraheze.org is not working for Firefox.
A lot of people like the use of github as it provides all of the control, merging, multi-user, approval that software has. Content management systems often have various features to try to achieve the same thing. Wikis are part of this.
If we decide we want a non-git solution, there still is another option that maps to SSGs well: People could set up sshfs or s3fs mounts to the VM / container where the SSG runs to convert inputs to the web site. Filesystems don't provide versioning by themselves. S3 object stores generally have a versioning mode that can be turned on. This solves the editing history of a file. But trying to get a point-in-time snapshot of which version of which files existed would take some kind of tool on top.
Sshfs+FUSE on Linux or SSHFS-Win+WinFsp on Windows works very well and is easy to set up.
S3fs mounts work with a MinIO S3 server or to AWS S3 or a variety of other providers. Then they can just edit local files which can directly, or more probably indirectly, get promoted to the resulting site. We can have individual or shared directories. This is what I often do, and will for some SSG publishing.
S3fs (i.e. s3fs-fuse) works very well, except for one case that we won't have: Do not list a bucket prefix that has millions of objects in it. In Linux / MacOS, mounting an s3 bucket as a local filesystem is just a simple mount command w/ credentials. For Windows, there is WinFSP to do what FUSE does, then there are a number of free & paid s3fs mount apps that do what s3fs does. This would be very convenient for copying in a set of images, videos, etc.
Over the last couple years, I have done a lot with MinIO and NetApp StorageGRID S3 servers, along with AWS S3.
We could even automatically commit the resulting changes to github to get history, and the ability to reset to earlier versions.
Github should be fine for most things we do with git, but git-remote-s3 is interesting: It stores git repos in an s3 object store. This can be convenient when everything else is stored in S3 too.
Looking again at Wiki-like SSG approaches, I find these:
https://mcshelby.github.io/hugo-theme-relearn
That said, there are many nice wikis. We would likely want to run one on our own system / VM / container somewhere. That should be least expensive with the least restrictions on space. But these tend to have more lock-in than SSGs using markdown files.
Stephen
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|
Stephen D.
Williams
Founder: VolksDroid, Blue Scholar Foundation |
Markdown has become the most popular markup format for applications where normal humans have to type and review text, especially when they are in a hurry. I think it started in the blogging world and eventually spread to newsrooms. It is plain text that uses syntax that is easy to type correctly and doesn't go off the rails when you make a mistake. Basic formatting features are very simple but the format is very customizable and extensible where needed. The first use was for applications where it was translated to HTML for the web but there are now tools to translate to and from almost any final document format that you want.It has also become the most popular format for AI. All the LLMs that I use prefer markdown as their communication format. AI skills and memories are most commonly markdown. Agentic system control files are usually markdown. When you upload other text formats, most of the system convert to markdown and then process that.
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