mdBook VS Wiki.js

A common misconception is that only programmers can contribute to open source project. Being a programmer of course make it possible for you to make changes to the source code of the application, but there are tons of other things that need to be done in a project. Especially if it is a large, end-user facing project such as Firefox, VLC, Moodle, or mdbook.

I personally use mdbook (and another home-made system) to build my own sites/books. here you can see examples of public mdbooks in various languages. You can also see them grouped by language.

mdBook is a Rust-based tool to create Web-based books from vanilla Markdown files. Although it is quite minimalistic, you will bump into it quite often in the wild. Most notably, the Rust Book uses it. I see it quite often in the Nix ecosystem, too.

I have a local site I use as a knowledge base, journal and scratchpad. I recently migrated it from mdBook to Hugo, using the Hextra theme. The result was so good that I started questioning my use of Zola as my primary static site generator.

Nice work. Any plans to somehow integrate into mdbooks (https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/) ?

Or a general web user-interface?

mdBook - Create Books with Markdown in Rust

Biggest downside of this tool is inability to render PDF or ePub[1]. This is why we recently switched to Quarto[2]. Typst is also a good alternative, already mentioned in other comments.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/issues/815

[2] https://quarto.org/

Link to Wikijs

Wiki.js is a self hosted, open source Wiki that has a lot of awesome functionality. Unfortunately it's lacking some small, but important UI features, like a light box, to enlarge downsized images to it's full size. And unless you want to add a link to each image, to open it in a new tab, you would probably go for a modal view here.

Can't think of anything that meets all the criteria, there's always some compromise, which might just be the way it is. For example I could 'self-host' otterwiki or wiki.js on a VPS for a pretty small monthly fee, which I could also use for other stuff that doesn't make sense for a home lab, but then I also need to deal with security since it's hosted on the internet. Or I could self-host and just accept that there's risk of it not being available when my wife needs it or if I die suddenly.

WikiJS as Homepage (a bit unusual, I know...)

I love PlantUML. I was always fond of it in my early days as a software engineer and still use it today, along with all the various ways to draw diagrams out there, whether it's through a web tool like draw.io or Miro or through markup like PlantUML and Mermaid.

Some stuff I'd like to share with the rest:

- PlantUML's default style has improved since the days of red/brown borders, pale yellow boxes, drop shadows and such but I've attempted fixing it before through a preset style [I've made before here](https://gist.github.com/jerieljan/4c82515ff5f2b2e4dd5122d354...). It's obsolete nowadays, since I'm sure someone has made a style generator somewhere, and last I checked, PlantUML allows a monochrome style out of the box.

- [Eraser](https://app.eraser.io) is promising, considering that it's trying to blend both diagram-as-code markup along with the usual visual diagram editor. I'm still seeing if it's worth picking up since Miro's hard to beat.

- On an unrelated note, [WikiJS](https://js.wiki/) is a self-hosted wiki that happens to support draw.io, PlantUML and MermaidJS diagrams out of the box. Quite handy to have for your own docs.

- I use Miro nowadays since it's significantly quicker to draw things freeform and to collaborate live with folks on a whiteboard at the cost of having your diagrams in markup, but it's easy to miss the integration that [you can actually import PlantUML](https://help.miro.com/hc/en-us/articles/7004940386578) and Mermaid diagrams in a Miro board too. You can also do edits too, but it's on its own PlantUML section, of course.