

Show HN: Piki, a fresh take on the wiki - Skoofoo
http://piki.heroku.com/

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hbz
I tried to edit the article entitled "Internal server error" but the controls
for contributing to it weren't intuitive enough.

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jblock
Sorry, but this color scheme is unreadable. Contrast is your friend!

And I'd rather not see a bunch of "test" articles with one paragraph or so.
Show me some dense, complex content, and maybe I'll grow interested (that and
not having it 500 every 30 seconds).

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chad_oliver
I actually love the color scheme. Horses for courses, I suppose.

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jblock
<http://saumya5.brinkster.net/hci/25.pdf>

Sorry, but a Wiki is about content, not looks.

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chad_oliver
I'm not convinced that such a precriptive statement makes sense. You could
just as easily say that long-form books are about content, not presentation,
yes I know of many books whose typography and presentation have a significant
effect.

Perhaps Piki isn't what you think a wiki should be. Congratulations, know we
know that semantic shift is alive and well.

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kennywinker
One of the cardinal features of a wiki is collaboration. It's unclear from
poking around in Piki if it has any way to handle communal editing.

I like the automatically formatting things into headings and subheadings, etc.
but couldn't figure out how to make links.

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Skoofoo
I chose to focus on making Piki as useful as possible for smaller wikis
written by individual writers. That's untypical of a wiki engine, but I think
it's something worth exploring. Mass collaboration is great for some things,
but the most original and polished work tends to come from individuals or
small teams.

There is currently no collaboration or custom links (though a URL will turn
into a link), but I plan to add these features in the future.

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sovande
Congrats! You just reinvented a web page from 1993.

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Skoofoo
Not exactly. Where Piki lacks in collaboration features, I believe it's far
ahead of any other wiki engine in terms of user experience, considering the
user is someone who wishes to have a place to organize their own thoughts and
ideas.

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silverlight
I like it! Simple and elegant. Throw in a little Markdown syntax for bolding,
italics, image embeds, etc., and I think you'd be well on your way to a cool
thing.

Like others, I wouldn't mind forking/contributing if you ever decided to make
it open source, but I respect it all the same if you don't want to go that
route. I would actually love to use this as a small part of an ongoing project
where we're thinking of including a small wiki functionality (although it
would need to be either open source or something that was able to run on our
servers for that, not remotely hosted...)

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Skoofoo
Thank you, that's what I was going for! Piki will never use a markup language,
but I plan to add drag-and-drop image embedding and right-click text
stylization.

People who seem to take the most interest in this also express desire to use
it locally. I'll have to figure out a way to cater to you folks.

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jhrobert
One can "style" text without a "markup language". For example star text star
<\- bold. I went further in <http://simpliwiki.com/SimpliWiki>

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lutusp
> One can "style" text without a "markup language". For example star text star
> <\- bold.

But that's a markup language. The difference between * text * and <b> text
</b> is a matter of syntax, not kind. Also, in most forums like this one,
asterisk text asterisk gives _italic text_.

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jhrobert
It becomes a "markup" language (ala markdown, etc) when the "markups" are
removed and replaced by htlm codes. As you noted, in HN, when using stars they
get removed and replace by some <i>...</i> stuff.

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lutusp
> It becomes a "markup" language (ala markdown, etc) when the "markups" are
> removed and replaced by htlm codes.

No. Asterisks that aren't lexical content are markup. HTML tags are also
markup, just a different markup. When you replace asterisks with HTML tags,
you're translating from one markup to another.

The markup cycle ends when the markup is rendered as styled text that a human
recognizes as lexical content. For example, italicized text.

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jhrobert
Sorry, my explanations were confusing.

The thing is I don't "replace" asteriks with HTLM tags, I keep the asterisks
visible.

If star text star displays star text star in bold (ie, not removing the stars,
inserting </b> stuff around the whole construct), is it still a "markup
language" ?

Let say I process a text file to display it in HTML and the only addition I do
is say "quoted content gets italicized". Is that a "markup language", or just
some "text embellishment"?

The issue I am trying to address is the learning curve with all the existing
markup languages. Without going the "wysiwyg" editing way, that is.

I figured out that if the "marks" are visible in the final result, they get
easy to learn.

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interg12
Feedback: Let me see the product before I create an account. I hate it when I
have to log in to something before they tell me what it is.

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Skoofoo
I figured that letting people write without an account was not worth the added
complexity, especially for a minimum viable product. You are free to look at
any of the published wikis; the interface for writing a wiki looks almost
exactly the same. I made the sign-up process as painless as possible, in case
you ever change your mind.

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Arelius
No thanks. No matter how simple you make a sign-up process, it'll always turn
people away.

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thebigshane
That is not a fact.

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Arelius
It's not, it's speculation. But it's probably naive to assume it's possible to
require information from a user (username, password is about minimal) and not
turn at least somebody away.

Also, perhaps not impossible, but I've yet to see it.

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mpd
True story: Piki was Stipple's original name, some 3+ years ago. I don't
remember now why we changed it...

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mietek
Probably because it sounds similar to a slur:

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pikey>

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jhrobert
I really liked that "section" -> "sub section" -> "paragraph" handling. Very
unobstrusive. I am yet to study "contenteditable" but I'm glad it lets one
designs such mechanisms. Kudos.

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Skoofoo
I'm happy that somebody recognized this :) It was a huge pain to mold the
contenteditable element into a polished wiki editor, but I'm pretty proud of
the results.

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binarycrusader
Server's overloaded already; and something about the stylesheet makes the font
appear weirdly garbled on FireFox ESR 10.

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Skoofoo
Sorry about the overload; this is my first web app and I can't afford to use
anything above Heroku's free plan. I will look into the garbled text problem.
:)

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ville
I went to the 'Learn' page first and then could not find a way to get back to
the home page to sign up.

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andrewflnr
Does Piki have a different data model from a "regular" wiki, or is it just the
UI?

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saraid216
Any plan to make this available to others someway somehow? I've been working
on a writing project that would be ideally captured in a wiki, and I've been
putting off the idea of writing my own software or deeply customizing other
software.

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Skoofoo
Ideally I would like to keep it as a service. Is there anything I could offer
other than the server to convince you to use Piki?

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obilgic
where is the source code?

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obilgic
<https://github.com/changs/piki>

