I love keeping all of you up to date on what’s happening in the big Geek Daddy family.  Part of the fun with this blog is learning new things that I wouldn’t pick up as part of my normal day.  I’ve learned quite a few new coding and programming tricks that I didn’t know last year at this time because of this blog (I’ve also spent one too many nights staying up to late, but that’s another story).  But one of the things I’ve struggled with is keeping all of this new information in a place I can easily find again and again.  Then I got to thinking… why should whatever system I come up with hold just my blogging and programming tricks. It’s been a while since I mentioned GTD (Getting Things Done), but one of the main points in GTD is that if you have a system to do a certain task, that system should work for whatever your processing.

So what new tool/gadget/website did I find to help me out?  Wikipedia.  No, not Wikipedia the website itself, but the software that runs Wikipedia. All of the software that runs Wikipedia (from MediaWiki) is available for free under an open source license.  This means that all of the software that runs the Internet’s most prolific encyclopedia can be downloaded in a few minutes – the web server, the database software, and the encyclopedia framework – for free!

So what I’ve done is wiped clean an old computer at home, installed all my free wikipedia
software, got a free dynamic web address, and mixed it all together.
Baked it at 375°F for 35 minutes and voilà… a personal digital
notebook. And this notebook can be used to store any kind of
information I may want to save and retrieve at a future date – text,
web link, picture, computer file, etc. Plus, with this setup I’m able
to access my wiki at any time via my iPhone, work computer, or any
other computer hooked up to the Internet.