I like to teach writing courses with wikis: even if students never edit anyone else’s pages, they’re easy entryways into version control and reflection across drafts. I’ve been using Wikidot for many years now, and while I like it quite a lot, my students have expressed some frustration that the Wikidot markup doesn’t translate to anything outside of Wikidot. It’s almost Markdown, but not quite.
So I’ve been looking for a Markdown-enabled wiki that will also be easy on the eyes. There aren’t many out there, in part because wikis are hard to retrofit, but I think I may have just found one in https://wiki.js.org/. Only problem: it runs on Node.js, and I don’t have the chops or the resources to run my own server. Since I already have and love my Reclaim account, I wanted to see whether there’d been any discussion of supporting that kind of architecture, and that search led me to two January 2015 blog posts by Tim Owens: “Brewing a Local Development Environment” and “NPM, Bower, and Grunt. Oh My!”
In the first post, Tim reported that
In mid-December, Jim and I had Kin Lane come for an intense few days where we began to architect the vision for Reclaim Hosting and Domain of One’s Own beyond the LAMP environment hinged on cPanel that we have now.
Specifically, he said they were looking into ways that Reclaim Hosting could “play a leading role in defining what the next generation of hosting applications for the web could look like,” perhaps through
Docker which in a nutshell provides virtualized containers for applications that have full control of the stack, so a LAMP application can run in a container right alongside a wiki running Node.JS and MongoDB.
To my wishful ears, this sounds like exactly what I’m looking for: some kind of dockerized space on Reclaim where I can test out this new wiki platform. But after those two posts about setting up a local dev environment, I couldn’t find the the continuation “in the next few posts” that Tim had anticipated at the time.
Life happens, of course, and the best intentions can be left by the wayside (don’t I know it!), so I’m really just asking innocently here: did anything implementable come of those early experiments? If I spend some time fiddling with a local Node.JS-and-MongoDB-based wiki, is there a chance I’ll be able to deploy it within Reclaim? Or would that be something I’d have to take elsewhere?
