...nwood...

As a one-time English major, I celebrate some twisted
pride in documenting my code and projects. In my zeal I've created a slew of text files, many with similar names,
many with deprecated info. How I could organize this
mess in such a way that it would be intelligible to another?
Moreover, how can I improve my own ability to quickly locate
information (full text searching) and deftly navigate related documents?

My problem seemed a perfect excuse to learn more about wikis and how I could tweek my familiar tools to make authoring a wiki quick and convenient.

1. A comparison of wiki software. I'm partial to PHP, so
   I quickly gravitated to phpWiki.

2. An exploration of how I could author my wiki without leaving the
   comfort of GNU Emacs.

Since installation of phpWiki is well documented (see the INSTALL and README files in the source distribution), I'll skip right to
the more interesting problem of tweeking Firefox to allow editing of
HTML textareas with Emacs.

The idea of editing from within phpWiki's textarea made me
uncomfortable. Not only would I be without my key bindings (and be
forced to interact with a mouse) but I wouldn't have any temp file
creation during my editing. (Power outages have been surprisingly
common at my workplace.) Furthermore Emacs already provides code-editing
(php-mode/html-mode/ColdfusionDeluxeMode), timetracking
(worklog-mode), SQL development (sql-mode), so why not wiki authoring?
(There are a confusing number of wiki modes for Emacs, which I won't
delve into here. The good news is that wiki
markup is really simple, so for now we'll just type in wiki tags manually.)

Months ago I'd discovered a
Firefox extension that allowed integration of an external editor by
right-clicking a textarea (Editus
Externus) however it had stopped working after I upgraded to the
most recent stable Firefox. (I sympathize with the programmer's
challenge.) Searching
further I found other ancient programs like Electrix and
Mozex that provided similar
functionality. Mozex looked the most promising, but even
the
most recent Mozex release was not compatible with Firefox 1.0.6.
Luckily a comment on the extensions page referred me to Paolo
Kaosmos updated Mozex 1.07.1.

Installing Mozex 1.07.1 is simple:

1. Download Kaosmos' mozex-1.07.1.
2. In Firefox choose File -> Open and browse to the xpi file.
3. Once installation is complete I think you need to close/re-launch
   Firefox.

4. In Firefox choose Tools -> Extensions and you should see an entry
   for Mozex 1.07.1. Right-click this entry and choose Options. Enter the
   appropriate DOS 8.3 path to your Emacs (or other text editor)
   executable. For me this is

   C:\Progra~1\emacs\emacs-20.7\bin\runemacs.exe %t

   Note:
   You can't use

   C:\Program Files\...