Feather Wiki

A tiny tool for simple, self-contained wikis!

FAQs & Tips /

Inspiration

Feather Wiki is designed as a tool for making wikis and non-linear notebooks, but with a little bit of creativity, you can do a lot of different things! Please submit your own ideas for using Feather Wiki (or links directly to your public Feather Wiki) using the "website update" label to get them added to this site to help others get a better idea of how they can use it!

1. Documentation/Guides #

Suppose you want to write documentation for something you've made. You have lots of options for generating static documentation and fancy HTML-only sites, but you want something small that you can include it in a zip file alongside your software. You could just write up a simple TXT file with your instructions in it, but it would be nice to have something that could be styled to fit your particular style guidelines. Instead of either putting a bland text file or including a maze of HTML output from a documentation generator, you could simply write it up in a Feather Wiki and just put that single HTML file in! That way it's small, it's available offline, and it's only one file for your users to deal with. Name your file "User Guide.html" or something like that, and away you go, simple as that!

2. Lightweight Blog/Journal #

Sure, it's not the ideal format for a blog, given all the other free options out there that allow others to comment on your posts, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another option that a) is so lightweight, b) looks decent, and c) is completely portable! Even standalone journaling apps require that you install their specific software, but Feather Wiki is entirely self-contained in your saved HTML file and can be run from any compatible browser. Here's how I would set up Feather Wiki to be used as a read-only blog:

First, set a page as your home page (or a few pages as categories) to use as a parent page for your entries. This home page can be used as an about page to explain your blog or talk about yourself or something like that and then can be set as your Feather Wiki's home page from the Wiki Settings. At this point, you can set your blog's title or add custom CSS to make it look just right.

Next, when you want to start writing entries, you can just create a new page with the title you wish and set the Parent to your home page (or a specific category). Either keep the slug as generated change the page slug to the current date—either will work, but Feather Wiki does keep track of the created and last modified date and time on each page, so manually specifying the date as the slug may not be entirely necessary depending on what you want. By default, when you create a new page, it is added to the end of the page order, which means your posts will display in chronological order from oldest to newest. You can manually change the page order in the Wiki Settings to set it from newest to oldest, but that could be tedious.

And that's pretty much it! If you want your blog/journal to be public, then you can publish it on any web hosting platform, otherwise you can just save it and use it as you wish.