Beginner’s Wiki Luminotes Goes Open Source
Luminotes, a personal wiki in the vein of PBWiki or TiddlyWiki but with a focus on helping beginners get started, has made its portable wiki package and desktop clients free and open source for all.
We previously peeked at Luminotes when it was a partially free service, but desktop clients, self-hosting and other features were locked behind a pay wall. Many commenters noted a preference for the already free alternatives like PBWiki, but with Luminotes now free and available for use in browsers, off thumb drives, and from Windows-based clients, it’s perhaps a more intriguing package for anyone who wants one place to drop all their thoughts, links, ideas and images, but finds Wikipedia-style markup a bit too intimidating to dive right into.
big news: Luminotes is now free! [Luminotes via Web Worker Daily]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Oh, nice. I've been using WikiPad for sort of a mind-mapping/documentation tool, but wasn't finding it very intuitive. Looks like this will be a better solution for me.
saffyre9
When will Google release a Google Wiki that destroys all of these?
@jonny6pak: Luminotes looks to be self-hosted. Tiddlywiki doesn't need hosting at all.
Erm . Where do I start? You compare PBwiki, Luminotes and Tiddlywiki. This is like comparing apples, a Power Mac, and Apple Records. They are completely different things.
PBwiki is a wiki -- an easily-modified, optionally collaberative set of pages hosted on the internet. Except that it's not called that any more: it's PBWorks. And these days they seem to be moving away from Wiki functionality.
Luminotes looks as if it is a "Personal Wiki" -- that is, a wiki that you run on your own web server. So it's not hosted on the internet at all. It looks like it comes with the Apache web server.
Tiddlywiki is like a personal wiki, but in fact it's just a javascript program. You run it in a web browser but don't need web server software like Apache.
@jonny6pak: Try TiddliWiki (tiddlywiki.com) and host it for free on TiddlySpot (tiddlyspot.com), or on your own site. Find an extensive list of plugins at TiddlyVault (tiddlyvault.tiddlyspot.com), and a more then helpful support group at http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki?hl=en
And if you want an easy to use formater look for the QuickEditPlugin on TiddlyVault.
Thanks! I've been looking for a super easy wiki-style shared note system that could be self-hosted. I'm interested to know if there any similar products that could be self-hosted on a web server that are not full blown/full featured wiki systems.
jonny6pak
Thanks to Lifehacker, I found Luminotes! It fits my need for a simple and elegant wiki/note app. :)
jlcsusara
@shadowfirebird: Luminotes is indeed a personal wiki. But you can either use it as a hosted wiki online or you can download a self-hosted, self-contained version. No Apache necessary.
witten
OpenPotion: Google already has a wiki out called Google Sites. And previously they had Google Notebook, which was perhaps even more similar to Luminotes (without the internal linking feature that Luminotes has). But Google Notebook was discontinued a few months ago.
witten
Luminotes developer here!
Just to clarify, Luminotes has been open source since day one. There have always been both free and paid online versions, and more recently a fully-featured free trial of the downloadable version was introduced.
Now, however, it's all free. Check out the blog for more details on the decision.
witten
A couple of weeks ago I downloaded Luminotes (then a trial version) and compsed a few notes. It was just too easy. After looking at numerous wikis that said they were free and easy to use I found that "free" meant limited space, then you had to pay. Also they were NOT all that easy to use. Luminotes is very simple and now completely free. I entered links and pasted in pictures and it is great! I do lots of research and now I can actually find things by subject. I think I'm in love.
ZorbaSthenelus