For quite some time now I’ve had a wish to use a simple wiki for some of my sites. I think the wiki concert is great and it proved in practice as well. When I was travelling to China in 2006 I’ve set up a simple wiki (RoWiki by Marc Rohlfing) on my home server to stay in contact with home. I wanted to achieve that I don’t have to write e-mails to each and everyone interested, but also stay in contact with things at home. That’s why wiki technology was perfect for my needs. I chose RoWiki because it was based on PHP, it had only one file and it used file system to save data. It wasn’t perfect, but it had everything I needed. The thing worked like a charm, everything went ok and I didn’t spend too much time on line but everyone could know where I was (and vice versa).

When I returned from my trip I received several more requests to set up similar sites for travel notes for my friends. In the mean time I have also added some functionalities to RoWiki that I thought were missing, above all connected to formatting and display of Slovenian characters.

RoWiki is not developed any more, which I regret. It’s still available for download on the Maintained by no one site. There were some tries to add it to Google Code as R1Wiki (the page seems to be 403 forbidden now, I don’t know the reason for this), there are many versions of a wiki that evolved from it (TigerWiki, LionWiki, WiiKiss,…), but in my opinion RoWiki (with my additions included, of course 🙂 was the greatest.

In one of the next posts I’ll explain how I chose my wiki now, after several years and with additional request in mind, including privacy, SEO and simplicity.