AlanBarber.Org
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
I'm Digitizing My Brain!
Ok, I’m not really digitizing my brain. He he he!
What I’ve done is install a Wiki on my home server, Monkey1, so that I can keep a knowledge base of information.
I’ve reached a point where I’m doing so much stuff that it’s getting hard to remember what I did. For example, I recently updated my home server which runs Windows Small Business Server 2003 with the SP1 (Software Patch 1) that Microsoft released.
Hopefully, everyone is familiar with the idea of Microsoft SPs but incase not here’s the short on it. Occasionally, Microsoft will take all the individual bug fixes and patches they release for their Operating Systems, be it Windows XP or Windows Server, and roll them into one big patch for that OS. The idea being that if someone has to reinstall their system or whatnot it would be pain in the butt to have to install several hundred individual patches. Instead you can just download and install one ubber-patch and get up to speed.
Now back to my example. I had just installed the patch and shortly after I noticed some error messages showing up in the windows event logs. I spent probably a good 2 hours searching message boards and websites for how to fix the problem. I finally managed to dig up the info and solve it. Hey, everything was good so I forgot all about it.
A few days ago I saw a message board post where someone had a similar problem and I was sure the thing that I did to fix my problem would work for them too. I sort of remember the steps to fix the problem but couldn’t remember exactly what to do. Well, crap to me if I didn’t spent another hour digging around just trying to find the website with the instructions I had used.
After this little incident I sort of started to realize that I need a way to keep track of this info and any other techie info I might want to use in the future.
So, I went out searched for Knowledge Base systems, FAQ systems, etc. Nothing seemed to work exactly how I wanted it to.
The problem is I wanted something very free flowing that I can build not only the information but also the very structure of how this info is organized. Someone suggested I use a Wiki.
Stepping aside again. A Wiki is basically a website that allows anyone to easily create and make changes to the contents of the website. Probabbly the largest and most well known Wiki is Wikipedia.
Again back to my story. I did some searching and came up with OpenWiki as a viable option. I was looking for an ASP based wiki because I don’t have PHP installed on my server and I don’t want to. That is another story in and of itself!
I went and installed OW on my server and so far things have been working well. I’m slowly converting over several folders of text files to the wiki and just dumping in anything else that comes at hand.
Going back to my example from above. I’ve made a wiki page called WindowsErrors. I put on it all the details about what the error you get is and the instructions on how to fix. Now if I ever need to fix that problem again, I can just open up my wiki navigate to the WindowsErrors page and there will be the solution. That’s 30 seconds to find the solution and not 1 or 2 hours of searching the web.
It’s really nice to just click a button and make a new page and add content and then have it there to reference later on. I know this is going to make my life much, much easier!
on 11/01/2005 at 11:39 AM