Instiki is a wonderful, free and easy wiki to set up on a win or *nix (including mac) machine. The 2 step process includes installing Ruby and Instiki and will have you up and running in less than 20 min (most of the time is spent downloading). Instik is a great way to run a personal wiki on your local machine or set one up to use for the members of your home network and it can be used to organize all kinds of data. Setting up and running a wiki with Instiki couldn’t be easier. 5 years ago

Instiki isn’t perfect; far from it. But with textile and OSX’s gorgeous and Adobe-free PDF functionality, it’s fully capable of assuming all the functionality I would normally get from a word processor, while allowing a high level of control over presentation without the constant headache of persuading word of just what it is you want to have happen.

I would prefer better page renaming, better deletion, and file support, but it’s hard to get that in a tidy and textile—friendly clickable install. And now that I’ve put together my little new-page-url-forming applescript dingus, I can create pages (or access existing pages, provided I know the exact title) with a single click, which gives it that tasty stickies-like instantaneity. 6 years ago

Using Instiki for everything

Motives

Instiki instead of a todo program

See here

Instiki instead of a notepad program

Instiki is wonderful, simple, fast, and powerful. However, I find myself continually wanting a text editor—while simultaneously being dissatisfied with the editors I have available. (TextEdit.app, SubEthaEdit, Stickies, Sidenote, WikityWidget, etc.) What I want is a place to keep small notes, things I need to take care of, things I’m going to want for reference over the short term, etc. Now, almost everything wrong with these programs can be addressed by Instiki, but there are some considerable difficulties that I have yet to work out in full. Here’s a start:

Ease of start

One of the things that I get out of something like Sidenote is that I don’t need to wait for it to start up before I can put something in it. I don’t have to start Safari and then navigate to the page I want and/or create a new one. It’s there, right there, when I need it. Except that you have to open it your mouse (which always misfires) or a keyboard combination—which still inexplicably requires you to hover the cursor over the window/drawer. So…

Partial solution: AppleScript

Okay, I don’t know anything about AppleScript, but I was previously able to use it to display a quotation from Doorways in the Sand Now I’ve used it to create a script (largely cribbed from an introductory tutorial and one of the existing url scripts in theurls folder) that opens a dialog box with most of the url for a new ugpx page there; so, once I append the name (like “Test” or Using+Instiki+as+my+Todo), it will either open the specified page or create it if it doesn’t exist yet. So if something jumps into my headspace, I can quickly file it somewhere appropriately specific.

Now, what I’d like to be able to do is map this to a keyboard shortcut…but in the meantime, I can get it through the applescript menu or the dock.

Also, it would be cool if I could have a menu of existing pages I could pull up to choose from. Or - this would actually be more useful - something that would let me choose one of my categories.

Ease of retrieval

The problem here is that, say, a program like SideNote allows rapid switching between files, while with Instiki I typically have to navigate at least twice to find the file I want.

Step 1: Bookmarks

One obvious solution is to use bookmarks. Now, which bookmarks? This is an excellent question. Most of my web pages are stored through Safari; I occasionally export them to Firefox and Opera. Now, this is not the world’s greatest solution, but it’s probably what I’ll work with for now, until I can work out something cooler through hallon, AppleScript, or something else.

Step 2: Tagging

1. One way to help me find not the page I’m looking for right now, but the page I need to work with sometime soon, it’s using the strong and simple categorization feature in Instiki. For example, I can have tags to indicate time-range, branch of life (work, home, whatever),
2. I introduced a !!!!! category designed to tag pages of high priority and high usage for quick referencing. This looks a little different from the other categories and, of course, floats to the top of the alphabetized list.
3. I set my safari home page to “All pages,” which has the categories across the top; this will allow me to place more of the burden on keeping current on Instiki’s design, and less on manual maintenance.

More radical departures:

Pure to-do list

From 43things:

(One thought that just occurred to me: in a separate Instiki wiki (or “web”), have one master page and generate many one-task pages off of it. The links on this page can be organized into whatever format suits—at random, by priority, by project. And as I finish each goal, delete its link (or, better, just unlink it) and then flush the now-orphaned task page.)

Mini-pages

Typically, I prefer to make one large page rather than many small ones. However, I may start breaking up long pages like my “TimeLog” (which contains comprehensive, though not extensive, notes regarding me moment-to-moment activities) in two sub-pages, like one log per day, etc. This would offer the advantage of more extensive, rich, accurate tagging.

category:organize, meta 6 years ago