Friday, July 23, 2010

How to serve your Wiki off DropBox

Firstly I wanted to mention how powerful DropBox is - I've tried a few cloud-based storage solutions (Humyo, SkyDrive etc) and this is the one that works more reliably than all of the others. You install the client on your Windows/iPhone/Mac/Linux box and you have a folder that synchronizes with every other authenticated instance of that account. You always have access to your documents and the iPhone app is superb. Even if you only have a web browser you can download what you need. It sits in the background and trickles stuff up to their data centre without you realising.
A really powerful feature is that there is a public folder which if you drop files into you can right-click and get a URL you can email to someone.


Something else I find very interesting is the one-file compact Wikis that you see - the best one I've found is TiddlyWiki which is superb for small collaborative projects.

By placing the index.html file (which includes everything you need for the Wiki - style sheets, database, everything!) in your public folder and getting the URL (which you could make easier with TinyURL or stick it on your domain in a frameset).

See www.threeboys.co.uk for an example. Of course it's only editable by about four machines, but that's part of the strength of it.


www.tiddlywiki.com
www.dropbox.com

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