kittywiki

kittywiki is a tiny little wiki program that's designed for building small websites! this website runs on it (and is in fact what i initially built it for) :3

i think being able to easily edit my website, create new pages, etc and have it go live instantly is really useful!! i've been interested in this idea for a while - in my almost-decade of having personal websites of some form i've built a couple custom CMSes inspired by wikis, but this one is the first that's actually kinda a normal wiki software with wiki features.

kittywiki is written in ocaml using the dream web framework, liquid templates, and irmin (for storing page contents in git). it's open source software,^[1] licensed under the Be Gay Do Crimes License, and the source code is available on git.gay.

kittywiki vs gitit

when setting up this site, i initially used gitit, which is a wiki software written in haskell that uses a git repo to keep track of page history/revisions/etc. i really liked how simple and customizable it was (i wrote a custom set of templates to make it look like this site currently does), but unfortunately i ran into performance issues. it was constantly eating up 10-20% of a cpu core and i couldn't figure out how to fix it (in large part because i do not know haskell)! so, i ended up just writing my own thing^[2] that is very similar but is much faster (and more flexible, while i'm at it)

things kittywiki has that gitit doesn't:

• good performance
• more flexible templates, making it easier to build your own site on top of it
• ability to move pages
• diffs using patience diff algorithm
• OIDC authentication
• slightly better file uploader
• no jquery! and overall less javascript
• a good page text editor (uses codemirror)

things gitit has that kittywiki doesn't:

• categories, templates, recent changes, talk pages, user pages
• search
• more supported page formats (it uses pandoc to produce html instead of just using a markdown parser)
• latex equation rendering with mathjax
• username/password auth

future development (as a wiki)

kittywiki is not complete, there are still a lot of features i want to add!! here's a list

• better auth:

  • right now it just allows anyone who can authenticate with the configured OIDC provider to edit anything. actual access controls would be useful
  • normal username/password auth would make it much easier to set up
  • support for a file that maps OIDC usernames to display names would be useful for OIDC providers that don't let you easily change it (cough cough tailscale)

• caching: currently it does not cache anything !!! and despite that, it is fast enough for this tiny site and probably many others, but it would be a good idea to improve on that

• more wiki features: user pages, talk pages, user contributions pages, recent changes, categories, templates

• make a default set of liquid templates that looks like a normal wiki. maybe just copy gitit's UI

• add editor for liquid templates to web ui, and store them in VC as well! and allow pages to include templates, combine markdown and liquid?

• automatically generate sprite sheet for 88x31 buttons

longer-term plans (as a general-purpose tool)

i want kittywiki to become a general-purpose tool for building dynamic server-rendered sites (not just static html/markdown). i think the ability of software like emacs, squeak/smalltalk, etc to allow you to introspect and modify the tool/application while in use is incredibly powerful. i want to work towards a goal of kittywiki being a similarly malleable, living, reflective system built on simple components and abstractions that combine well. i want to, wherever possible, remove the distinctions between using and developing the application/tool

at least at the start, i (roughly) plan to do this by:

• developing the basis for a plugin system so that kittywiki can load and unload external modules at runtime
• developing a system that allows the kittywiki binary to recompile and replace itself, and store its own code in the git/irmin repository it currently just uses for page data
  • or possibly compile to bytecode on the fly? unsure
• developing a web-based editor for editing all the ocaml source code of kittywiki, and implementing web server routes for modifying the code in the repo
• getting rid of liquid templates in favor of a custom template language that's better integrated with ocaml
• developing various features to better integrate the editing experience into the page content, like maybe a button that lets you click an element on a page and jump to the part of the source that generated it?

this is all very broad in scope and given i have a full time job, i'm unsure when i'll have the time, but i would really like to get to this someday. i've dreamt of a system like this for so many years :) ^[3]