Off to a slow start after a busy weekend.

I’m yet to write any actual content for my thesis, but I’m actively using a wiki for keeping track of the ideas I have, articles I’ve read and so forth. My choice of wiki engine is TWiki, which fits my needs quite nicely.

Pros:

• It looks good and is quite polished for an open source tool
• Easy on the server requirements, as no database is required: everything’s stored in flat files
• You can create multiple webs (kinda like spaces for any Confluence users out there); so, I can have multiple wikis in one instance, basically. Currently, I have one for my thesis, one for personal stuff, one that I’ve shared with a bunch of friends etc - access rights can be set per web
• It is truly a wiki: for example, much of the configuration is done by changing values in special wiki pages

Cons:

• It is truly a wiki: setting access rights is done by adding usernames to a variable in a special purpose wiki page. Quite error-prone and not exactly as easy as clicking on checkboxes per-user / similar
• The wiki syntax is somewhat unintuitive at times, and could be less verbose: for example, [[http://google.com][this is what a link looks like in wiki markup]]
• It’s written in Perl; won’t be touching the source even if provided with a longish stick

Once I get underway writing the actual thesis, I’ll definitely be using - and writing in - LaTex. In my previous school projects, I’ve used Texlipse, which is a rather nifty Latex plugin for Eclipse. But now, having used a wiki for much of the initial work, I’d love to keep writing using a wiki, with approriate LaTeX -syntax support thrown in, and using LaTeX to manage references to source articles. I’ll have to investigate my options further.