A long chat with the Dekiwiki guy, Aaron

3 comments

Posted on 15th December 2006 by Chris in General |Wiki

A few days ago I posted about Dekiwiki, particularly lamenting the need for root access to install it. Aaron F, one of the bigwigs at Mindtouch, had commented on a blog posting offering help. He didn’t respond for a few days, so I posted again, frustrated. When he did respond (for the record, my original email was on 12/6, he responded on 12/12) his email read like this…

Installing DekiWIki currently is a total pain in the !@#. In fact, it can not be done without having root access, which is not provided on any shared host that I know of. We are a small team at MindTouch and have been hoping someone in the community would assist us in making the software easier to install.

Ok so he recognizes that for those of us dependant on shared hosting, DekiWiki is impossible to install. Unfortunately, Aaron articulates that it is a low priority for their team, and would be difficult to do based on their use of the mono framework (open source version of Microsoft’s .net service). So even if Bluehost would give me root access, they would have to have mono installed, which I highly doubt.

He did make an attempt to respond to Jamesen, who commented on my most recent Dekiwiki posting…

Jamesen, I’m sorry to hear you had a bad experience with one of our ‘commercial units.’ I am very surprised by this. Are you referring to DekiBox? The only dissatisfied customer that I was made aware of (and I’m not omnipotent) related to a customer thinking the device broadcasted a wireless network, gave them access to the Internet, and thought it was also an email server. I encourage you to contact us directly
“http://mindtouch.com/contact”>http://mindtouch.com/contact . Your feedback is very important to MindTouch. Alternatively, you can contact me at my direct phone number: 866 MINDTOUCH ext 1102.

For the record, I did not ignore Chris. I hope that Chris posts an update here and highlights some points I made in my email to him. I received Chris’ email, as he correctly cites, 12/6. I responded 12/12. I would have responded sooner, but I was on the road. Moreover, for the volume of email I receive daily a 6 day lag in response, imo, is really quite good.

I might strongly disagree with a six day turnaround being “quite good” especially given the offer for help as a comment. I emailed him the same day he commented. I understand being busy, I guess I am just impatient in this modern world. I assume that unless a response comes within 48 hours it will receive no response.

I called Aaron and we spoke. Partly I was curious to hear the Mindtouch side of the story in terms of no shared hosting availability and it turns out to be a market issue more than anything. It seems like the education market is not thier target. They sound like a busy company, destined for involvement in corporate wikimaking, which is not necessarily a bad thing, just a choice. I told him straight out that I do not forsee many classroom teachers using DekiWiki unless it is installed districtwide. I maintain that it is hard to compete with Wikispaces and Wetpaint.

So there, I have given Dekiwiki its due. Now it’s on to bigger and better things.

Lamenting DekiWiki’s lack of Shared Hosting capabilities

5 comments

Posted on 11th December 2006 by Chris in General |Wiki

I wish DekiWiki had support for shared hosting customers.

I have heard it said that a blog is by nature a representation of one’s own life and personal interests. That said, you all probably know how interested I am in wikis. One of my more useful posts (judging by the ongoing interest) was my original post on wikis. It still seems to generate traffic. A recent comment by Aaron F of MindTouch recommends I take a look at DekiWiki. The comment reads like this…

Chris, you will definitely want to take a look at MindTouch?s DekiWiki (www.mindtouch.com or www.opengarden.org). It has the most sophisticated in browser WYSIWYG there is. It?s also open source. I am passionate about making knowledge easy to consume and accessible to everyone, which may be why I?m very enthusiastic about 1). education 2). open source. Let me know if there is anything I can help you with.

The trouble I am having with DekiWiki is that it is not readily installable for shared hosting customers, and not many teachers (let alone end users) will have root access which is necessary to make the changes required by the installation routine. A comment on this digg story pretty much sums up the frustration which reads like this..

Another wiki which requires so many prerequisites that it cannot be installed on shared hosting. Its fine to assume that everyone has complete control over their server, but it would be more realistic to try to reduce requirements to those that an average shared hoster can control. I understand that its hard to do great things without some additional libraries… but at the same time, its hard to get people to use your offerings if they can’t install them. (BTW, if you assume that the average business user has control over their internal server, you’d be wrong again).

Yes, I know they sell a wiki-in-a-box to solve this problem. So, I don’t expect to see them putting any effort into more reasonable requirements, but perhaps other devs can modify the code.

I am not sure that I would have looked into DekiWiki had it not been for the comment by Aaron on my blog. I felt that he deserved a response and that I should look into it to see if it had ramifications for the classroom. I think you deserve that.

Well when I first read the installation guide, I was struck by how “linuxy” it is. I was certain that even though I have SSH access enabled, they would not allow me to apt-get. I was also pretty sure they wouldn’t let me edit the php.ini file. Rightfully so! I wouldn’t let me edit it either!

So I was left with two options. Either I could 1) give up, or 2) install it locally on my linux box at home. I will probably do the latter some time, but for now I am sort of giving up. Unless I were a tech director who could make these decisions, DekiWiki doesn’t have the ease-of-installation necessary for educators. With Wikispaces offering free wikis that folks are snapping up, it is hard to justify anything that is not turnkey easy. Wetpaint also offers a solid wiki that kids find very easy to use. I don’t mind a complex installation, sometimes it’s worth it. In this case, I can’t make it work at all! I can’t even get past the download box!

A quick Google search turns up only a couple results, of which I comprise one third. This indicates either folks are giving up or there is not much of a market for education, or not enough interest. Again, I am only investigating this based on what Aaron said in the comments.

His comment also says “Let me know if there is anything I can help you with” so I wrote him an email (on the same day as the blog posting, December 06, 2006) with my concerns, asking if I had missed something. My email said exactly this, and this has not been edited.

I actually downloaded it recently, but one thing that will keep dekiwiki from the mainstream teacher arena is the installation instructions.

For example, if I want to install wordpress, I download it, create a mysql database, edit the config file, and then upload and maybe run an install script (can’t recall).

With dekiwiki, the instructions seem to be written for me as a server operator on debian as opposed to a shared hosting user, as are the teachers I know.

See the difference between that and some of the other options?

Did I miss a set of instructions geared toward the shared hosting user? I would happily take another look!

As of today, I have received no response. Needless to say I am disappointed.

There is a service called Viawiki that allows folks like us to sign up for a free Dekiwiki. I did so, because I wanted to try out their browser-based WYSIWYG editor. As you know, WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM editing is requisite for me. I will go into why in a later post, but I deal with 11 and 12 year-olds and I only have them for nine weeks so I can’t afford to teach wiki markup syntax.

I did sign up for a wiki on their wiki farm, and a cursory glance shows a strong wiki with quality editing features. I like it’s built in editor is quality. There are a lot of good features, but the free account is limited to 25 mb. Can that compare with other wikis that have no such restrictions, especially when other services are also ad-supported?

Aaron said he has a heart for education and open source, so I am willing to admit he was busy or otherwise occupied and unable to respond. If there were a version of DekiWiki open for shared hosting installation, I would install it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that is not the case. I suppose I will have to remain disappointed. I guess you might consider this a call for DekiWiki to help us educators out and show that “enthusiasm”? I ask genuinely, because I think this product has a lot of possibilities for education, it just needs to be as accessible as the information it will hold.

Testing out TWiki, a CGI based wiki approach

4 comments

Posted on 3rd December 2006 by Chris in Software |Wiki

I suppose it is no secret that I am a little bit obsessed with wikis. I think that the level of collaboration available through the use of a wiki is superb and unparalleled. As you may know, I recently did a thorough review of a short list of wiki selections in a two part series.

In my unending quest for the perfect wiki, I have been playing around with wikis that seem to be more geared toward the corporate world. My most recent dip in the wiki pool took me to Twiki.

What intrigued me about Twiki is that it is CGI based, as opposed to PHP. I had to do some serious work to get this one to work on Bluehost, although that is NO fault of theirs, this is just a complex program. But now I am wiser, and that is always my goal in learning this stuff. We talk so much about being lifelong learners, and this is one way I am completing this goal.

This post will also serve as a bit of a tutorial as to how to make TWiki work on bluehost.

1. The first thing you must do is download the software from www.twiki.org.

2. I would highly recommend NOT using SSH to unpack the files. I typically DO use SSH since it tends to work so much better than FTP’ing. The problem is that the permissions were wrong, so when I first attempted my site (after fixing the next problem) it looked like heck. Turns out I had to change the permissions to the /pub directory to 755 recursively. Had I unzipped the package (or extracted the tarball) to my desktop in a directory and then uploaded it, I would have avoided this problem.

I did post to the TWiki support board (not sure if I can really call it a forum) and even I was a bit confused by the posting process. They noted in a follow-up comment that 755 might be a smidge unsafe, as the executable flag is not needed, and that they recommend 644. Would that I were to keep this program installed, heed their advice I would.

On a related note, this bug was relative only to TWiki, and I will continue to use SSH (secure shell access) and Putty for many years to come. I like the command line interface and control features.

3. I also had to change the file extension on everything in the /bin directory. I have to admit, this was a real pain in the neck. I felt like I should not have had to work so hard to get a wiki installation working. I began to seriously question whether it was worth it. After changing all the extensions, it worked.

I then had to get Bluehost to install the CGI::Sessions extension for me. I am not quite sure if this is necessary, but I ran across it so many times in learning about the Twiki install process that I decided to go ahead and have it there if I needed it. As I understand it, the CGI::Sessions would be necessary if I were using some sort of authentication system for logins and permissions. So now it’s there, and it gave me one more chance to be impressed with Bluehost. They really have been fantastic!

Since TWiki is a CGI based wiki, it typically cannot run in a root directory, so one needs to use an .htaccess file to properly redirect. I didn’t set this up since I had decided against Twiki, but there it is nonetheless. I will post a follow up with more information on making Twiki work with Bluehost, as there is a more thorough, manual way to do it.

You can see the basic installation here. Scratch that, I deleted it, decided it was too much of a security risk and I didn’t want to change all the permissions again. So Twiki is gone.

So, now that TWiki is has been installed, here are my impressions.

Overall, I am not terribly impressed. One limitation that is inherent to using CGI is the naming scheme. Everything has to be what they call “WikiWord” which means it is all one word, with little to no separation characters. So, a page that Wikispaces would call Cool+Ed+Tech+Stuff Twiki forces you to call CoolEdTechStuff. If Wikispaces didn’t add the + symbol for you, this would be a bit of an issue, but they do, so it is a seamless naming scheme. This applies to most of the hosted wikis that feature WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM editors. As I understand it, the reason behind the WikiWord naming scheme is that it lends itself to automatic inline hyperlinking. So if I were in the throes of document creation, I would not have to worry about manually hyperlinking back to the originating documents, provided I inserted the proper WikiWord name.

I am not sure why I am so interested in wiki offerings. I keep coming back to Wikispaces and Wetpaint, almost exclusively. I keep looking at Jotspot, wondering how it’s going to look once it’s fully integrated with Google.

I notice that David Warlick uses PMWiki. It would work well for me, but Wiki Markup language is so difficult for my young students, which contraindicates its use in my classroom (along with MediaWiki, etc etc). I keep going back to the WikiMatrix to see if anything new has surfaced. Maybe one day the wiki market will grow to one that is hosted and appropriate for kids.

I did get an email from www.helpingstudents.org (not linking) and I noticed that they simply use jspwiki, and I wondered what the benefit is. Seems like Wikispaces is a stronger wiki (not to mention WetPaint). My solitary gripe about Wetpaint is the limited amount of wiki space. I look at Wikispaces and see a little menu, and lots of editable space. The menu on the right on each Wetpaint is a little bothersome for me and my kids. I am hoping Kevin and those guys will consolidate the menu.

One major positive for WetPaint is the monthly (I think) status updates. I got a little email the other day telling me my wiki was 315th of over 100,000. That was nice to see, along with how many contributions I had made, and related other sundry information.

And so continues my obsession with Wikis. Part of the reason I continue down this road is because I feel like kids will be using Wikis in their jobs, and since the job market is changing so much, I think they need to learn about these now. I thought it would be fun for them to use one of the major players in the corporate wiki market, such as SocialText, Confluence, or Twiki.