I have a lot of stray text files containing notes on my computer. It’s a rather messy situation that has me typing commands like ls *.md | grep "something", often escalating to increasingly desperate variations like ls */*/*.md | grep ... I’ve been meaning to clean them up for a long time – and I’ve also been meaning to make a personal wiki to negate the need for this kind of searching.
Enter Nanoc: a flexible and simple static-site generator. Getting started is pretty straightforward:
$ gem install nanoc
$ nanoc create-site wiki
Move or rsync your markdown/html files to wiki/content. Then it’s as simple as running nanoc in your directory.
To serve, you can install the adsf gem and run nanoc view or deploy to a web server. I’m using Nginx with rsync as described here (installation instructions for Ubuntu here and here – I use elementary OS).
To make maintaining my wiki as low-effort as possible, I write all my notes in my Documents folder. I have a cronjob set up to rsync them to my nanoc site and deploy it:
$ rsync -a <my home folder>/Documents/content <my home folder>/Code/<my wiki>/content
$ nanoc
$ nanoc deploy public
Et voilà! A no-effort and neat way to store my notes.