I saw this Lifehacker post a few days ago and I wanted to try it. I have a new 2 gig USB drive that I'm only using for Portable Firefox, why not?
I installed XAMPP and MediaWiki on the drive, it was actually really easy getting everything to work.
Yea success!
So what am I going to use my new wiki for? I have no clue, probably nothing because I have about 3 other wikis in various places. All that matters is I feel like I accomplished something tonight.
You're such a wiki person, aren't you? The interesting question is if you locally cache the whole of Wikipedia, how do you synchronise the updates back to the server?
If you are ever in London, you should turn up to London Wiki Wednesday. You'd get on with those folks brilliantly :-)
Yes, next time I just happen to be in your neighborhood, I will have to consider Wiki Wednesday. :)
Hm, you could pull down all of Arborwiki and have a local reference encyclopedia everywhere you go in town - that might actually be usable. (though the google map references are offline so you'd be stuck without a map interface).
You know Ed, that does seem to be an interesting use for a USB wiki.
In my case I have MapSource software for my GPS receiver which can be used offline, even a simple address would let me find a location using that, and actually if I had my GPS receiver with me all I would need is the address to plug directly into that too.
Maybe outside of USB wiki territory but Geocaching.com lets you download waypoints straight from their website to GPS, it could be a useful feature for something like ArborWiki too.
I'd be interested in a followup post if you do end up using this for something. I'm tempted to try it just for the exercise of learning to do it. :)
Hi Jason, actually installing it was pretty easy, although I don't know if I'll use it for anything. I tried it out at work and it doesn't run, I suspect because of how our computers are locked down. I mostly only use my flash drive at work anyway.
If I do think of any uses though, I will certainly share!