Hello (ikiwiki), World!\n

ikiwiki succeeded where other competitors failed: convincing myself to set up a blog. This is the unavoidable "Hello, world!\n" post. Thanks Joey for this valuable piece of software, I love the subverted wiki concept and I('m starting to) like also the markdown syntax.

Still, the experience in setting up the blog has not been painless, here are some rough edges I haven't yet addressed with ikiwiki (IOW dear lazyweb section from now on):

• working offline and then commit is fine, but I would have loved the usual draft->publish release cycle of many blogs. More generally I'm missing a way to hide pages in ikiwiki. Ok, hiding stuff it's not in the wiki spirit, but it is definitely in the spirit of VCS to commit as often as possible to avoid losing work!

• markdown syntax is not supported per default in the current vim in unstable. I found a vim syntax extension for markdown, ... /me is going to add it to the vim package in unstable (or at least to vim-scripts, not sure yet).

• when writing post offline the "preview" feature is desirable as much as it is when writing online. Thus my first setup involved running ikiwiki on my laptop and then sync the result on the machine serving the page. Unfortunately, ikiwiki seems to be meant to be run on the final machine (for example: the ikiwiki.cgi is a arch specific code generated for the machine executing /usr/bin/ikiwiki). My current solution is then to run ikiwiki both on the machine I use to write posts and on the machine serving this blog ... better ideas?

• a couple of minor nuisances (the dates at the bottom of posts shown in Italian format, and all links in the RecentChanges page broken if I dare rebuilding with --rebuild). But hey, I know, it's free software, I'll eventually try to come up with a patch for these!

Again and nonetheless, kudos to Joey for ikiwiki, it rocks!