Satellite
January 2008 – August 2008
The Need
Over the years, I have used various solutions for reference systems. I tried wikis, online web services such as Backpack, and plain-text approaches, but nothing worked quite right. I needed something as flexible as a wiki that I could access from any computer, and that I could edit offline on my laptop.
A Distributed Wiki
Nothing fit my needs, so I created Satellite, a distributed wiki with automatic online/offline synchronization between one or many clients. Satellite supports all the regular wiki features as well as textile markup, easy inter-page linking, and hotkeys for common actions.
Needing something more light-weight than pre-existing web frameworks, I created a custom view-controller framework that interacts with raw Mongrel web server requests. Instead of a relational database, I leveraged the Git distributed content tracking system as a data store.
Satellite is open-source, is no longer actively maintained. I’ve switched to a modified version of GitHub’s Gollum.
Key Technologies
- HTML
- CSS
- Ruby
- Javascript
- Git (as both SCM and data store)
- Mongrel
- Linux