Show HN: Piki, a fresh take on the wiki

http://piki.heroku.com/

by Skoofoo • 14 years ago

27 39 14 years ago

piki.heroku.com

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

Skoofoo9• 14 years ago

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. :)

saraid216• 14 years ago

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.

Skoofoo9• 14 years ago

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?

silverlight• 14 years ago

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...)

Skoofoo9• 14 years ago

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.

aidenn0• 14 years ago

I'm surprised people want to use it locally; I would have thought yet another local wiki would be the last thing people want.

jhrobert4• 14 years ago

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

kennywinker• 14 years ago

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.

Skoofoo9• 14 years ago

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.

sovande• 14 years ago

Congrats! You just reinvented a web page from 1993.

tommorris• 14 years ago

> the most original and polished work tends to come from individuals or small teams.

Counterpoint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

Find me a single-authored article that goes into the level of detail on the same topic...

derleth2• 14 years ago

> wikis written by individual writers

You've just missed the point so completely I believe there should be an award for the magnitude of missing-the-point you have achieved.

interg12• 14 years ago

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.

Skoofoo9• 14 years ago

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.

Arelius2• 14 years ago

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

jblock2• 14 years ago

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).

chad_oliver2• 14 years ago

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

jblock2• 14 years ago

http://saumya5.brinkster.net/hci/25.pdf

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

mpd• 14 years ago

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

mietek• 14 years ago

Probably because it sounds similar to a slur:

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

hbz• 14 years ago

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

andrewflnr• 14 years ago

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

obilgic2• 14 years ago

where is the source code?

obilgic2• 14 years ago

https://github.com/changs/piki

jhrobert4• 14 years ago

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.

Skoofoo9• 14 years ago

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.

ville• 14 years ago

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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