

Announcing Markdoc - zacharyvoase
http://blog.zacharyvoase.com/post/246800035

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mcav
This looks to be quite useful. I've tested it just now and it works as
advertised, minus a couple of installation quirks. It's interesting to me that
it follows almost exactly the same principles as text-based blogging system as
Jekyll and the like; goes to show you that plain text works.

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Sjuul
Did you look @ didiwiki <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DidiWiki>

It also uses markdown syntax and the code is VERY nicely written C. It's not a
lot of code and pretty straightforward.

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alec
Ikiwiki seems to target the same nitch as Markdoc. Do you know how they
compare?

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zacharyvoase
I hadn’t seen Ikiwiki before, but initial inspection shows that the setup
procedure is tied to the VCS (<http://ikiwiki.info/setup/>), and the whole
thing seems too heavy-duty for my needs.

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joeyh
Hi, I wrote ikiwiki.

I'm glad to see some (more) competition; generating a static wiki out of
markdown files kept in an arbitrary VCS seemed like such an obvious Right
Thing that I was amazed nobody had quite done it before when I started in
2006. So it's good to see this and other projects like gitit explore the space
some more.

The setup procedure you linked to uses a VCS because most people want to, but
ikiwiki is VCS agnostic right down to running w/o one, and can be used in
quite light-weight, simple ways. (Ie: Make a directory; put an index.mdwn in
it; run `ikiwiki src public_html`to build and publish; done.)

I'm curious: Does markdoc really require its own built-in http server? Or was
that included only to ease basic setup? And does it support editing pages via
the web? Does its caching allow it to do incremental builds of only changed
files, or is the whole wiki re-rendered each time it is built?

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zacharyvoase
Hi Joey,

As I said, I haven’t really investigated Ikiwiki, but it does seem like a very
comprehensive utility. Still, I was looking for something different, and I’m
sure Ikiwiki is a better solution for certain use-cases. To answer your
questions:

* No, Markdoc doesn’t require its own HTTP server, but being able to run 'markdoc serve' is helpful.

* No, pages can’t be edited via the web. That would require an authentication system, and would introduce some difficulties w/r/t version control (or require some VCS coupling).

* The way incremental builds work (at the moment) is that the whole wiki is re-rendered into a temporary directory, and then rsync'd into the HTML root. I’d like to write a 'markdoc refresh' command in future, but at the moment rendering is so fast there’s little need to.

