PmWiki | Profiles / RussFink

Russ Fink is a software professional and PhD student in computer science. He enjoys biking, running, golf, tennis, sport fishery, NASCAR racing, home improvement, mountain climbing, rugby, snake wrestling, inventing, and professional curling. Note that he didn't say he actually does any of that stuff, just that he enjoys it.

Russ does NOT enjoy CSS. For instance, how can you prevent inheritance of selected parent attributes? In C++, you'd declare them as "private" in the parent. What's the equivalent in CSS? Can you tell that I've been making a custom skin ? I hope to post a first attempt which is actually pretty decent, imho, but wasn't liked by the customer (my wife) so I resorted to hacking up Patrick Michaud's default skin and that seems to be working pretty decently. Okay, enough CSS bashing.

Russ is very particular about the English language, as you can tell, and many of his edits on this site pertain to language and/or clarity issues. The big draws to wiki is the ease of expressiveness, searchability, security. Also important is organic content hierarchy; this means groups aren't created a priori, they just sort of spring up as needed. PmWiki is very good for all of these things. It's also a snap to set up.

Russ' wish list for PmWiki:

"sortable" flag for basic tables, providing links in columns enabling users to sort the table alphabetically by selected columns. PITS does this, but I don't want the overhead of PITS. More on this feature:

      ||border=0 sort=0   # sort on column 0 initially, treating first row as implicit header 
      ||col1 ||col2 || ...
      ||datum1 ||datum2 || ...

separation of documentation into Developer and User. When searching the documentation for a term, I often wonder, "Is this page discussing things I can write in my markup, or is it discussing PHP variables I would put in my scripts?" I think there need to be two separate categories for documentation, and pages need to be moved into the correct ones. This is a large undertaking, to be sure. One trait all wikis share is lack of (IMHO) good documentation. PmWiki has got good docs (one of my choice points), but it could be a little more organized. Not trying to offend anyone.

Russ' choice of PmWiki was based on his knowledge of one other wiki. Here's his assessment and why he chose to use it:

MoinMoin - Russ uses this at work, and it's decent; however, the markup and formatting are primitive, and it requires Python.
Twiki - was scared off by comments that it is hard to set up.
Usemod Wiki - seems to be the first one around, but wanted something more recent.

Russ' Current Home Page