
A static wiki-like site via forms, email, and local scripts - ColinWright
https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/HowTheFarragoWorks.html?sh18hn
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mhd
I kinda miss the days of the early "Wiki Wiki"s. These days, most wikis I
encounter are "intranet" ones, serving as some kind of documentation site.
Most often using rather heavyweight implementations like MediaWiki that allow
for all kinds of hierarchical organization, CMS-like features etc.

But in its simplest form, you had just a small sliver of code that allowed you
to edit text files that then were rendered as HTML to the user dynamically,
the most important "markup" being a translation of WikiWords to hrefs,
allowing you to easily link together PageAboutFoo to PageAboutBar.

That's it. There were some very minimal implementations that did this with
e.g. a few lines of Perl.

Everything else is either luxury or bloat.

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thsealienbstrds
Coincidentally, I made something like this for myself. Although perhaps not
really a wiki, it's a static-site generator that uses e-mail messages as
input.

It's based on a ~400 line Python script that extracts mails from specified
folders in my mailbox and a ~100 line Bash script that turns it into a
website. It's not user-friendly really... but I like the fact that the system
is rather simple (bias mine).

The Python script takes a mailbox folder, concatenates the bodies of all the
messages and stores the result in a single file derived from the mailbox-
folder's name. The attachments for a message are stored in a dedicated folder
for each message, where the names of those folder are derived from the
subjects of the messages, and the attachments' filenames are simplified.

The Bash script then assumes that the resulting collection of concatenated
files are in markdown format and runs Pandoc on them to generate the HTML
files. Then, the entire result is copied to document-root.

As it is, it is mainly useful for (micro)blogging... it's a bit tedious to
edit markdown on a smart-phone, especially linking to files. On the other
hand, it's basically Twitter in 500 LOC. There's got to be some value in that.

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ColinWright
I know the title given here is not that of the linked article, but it's an
accurate description of the content, whereas the article title is not.

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city41
This was a fun read, thanks for sharing.

I recently kind of did a 2019 version of this. I built a site with gatsbyjs,
and users can submit corrections via a form that POSTs to a google survey. I
look at the row in the spreadsheet the survey created, if it's good I copy it
to another spreadsheet and redeploy. I haven't automated that part as I get
submissions very rarely, but I could.

Not saying it's a good way to build a website. But it is interesting exploring
ways to build a site without a backend that probably should have one :)

