Personal Wiki on Windows

Mike Caulfield offers this start-to-finish summary based on hosting pages for himself. tweet post

It’s 2018, and I’ve still not found anything that helps me think as clearly as federated wiki. At the same time, running a web server of your own is still, in 2018, a royal pain. But such is life.

So I recently started looking at whether I could do federated wiki just on my laptop and not deal with a remote server. It doesn’t get me into the federation, per se, but it allows all the other benefits of federated wiki — drag-and-drop refactoring, quick idea linking, iterative note-taking, true hypertext thinking.

It turns out to be really easy (I mean as things go with this stuff). I’ll go into detail more below, but here are the steps:

- Download Node.js for Windows. Install. - Open a command window and type: npm install -g wiki - Launch via command window: wiki -p 80 –security_type friends –cookieSecret ‘SECRET’ - Navigate to localhost in a browser - Click the lock to “claim” the wiki as owner - Click the “wiki” link to take it out of read-only mode. - Go forth and wiki…..