So, I have decided to take a shot at using a multi-site installation of Wordpress, as an alternative to Surfulater. It's set up locally, only accessible on my LAN, and I have decided to call it
Packrat Palace.
Bitnami makes it really easy to set up on Windows, with
an installer that contains everything you need, preconfigured. So, you won't need to go through all the steps of installing and configuring Apache, and MySQL or MariaDB, and PHP, and Wordpress (with all the steps involved with that), and configuring Wordpress to be multisite. It's a single .exe that does it all for you, and when it's finished, you just log into your multi-site and go.
Because mine is not publicly accessible, on the internet, there's a lot of the typical plugins I won't need, such as SEO, anti-spam, contact forms, social widgets, ads, analytics, etc. That will free up resources and page space to concentrate on useful features.
And there's lots of great plugins to do plenty of useful, interesting things, so I'll have a lot of freedom with it, to add or remove features, as I go along, perhaps even with various plugins I might not have considered on a publicly accessible site (such as
PHP Everywhere). Different layout & design themes and plug-in combinations for each "notebook" is also possible. And I have both tags and nested categories available to use, right out of the box.
Everything used is free and open source, but there's also the possibility of using premium plugins, if they prove to be useful.
So, here's an early stage of what I have going on. There's not much actual content added, yet, but it does illustrate the basic framework of the whole concept.
Front page of main "notebook" will display 5 most recent items from each main category, with a search bar above the whole thing.
Table of Contents tab, which also features a search bar.
Articles, with search bar on the right. It's also possible for longer articles to have their own table of contents, embedded at the top, to jump to various sections. I do plan on setting up conditional sidebar widgets that will display a table of contents focused only on the category currently being viewed.
Oh, by the way, one thing I did have a problem with is logging into the multi-site on my LAN. Google decided (for security reasons) that nobody should ever want to log into a website whose URL is an IP address (unless it's 127.0.0.1) or a single word without a TLD (unless it's localhost), so Chrome, and any other Chromium/Webkit based based browser, can't log into anything where the URL is something like
http://snax/ without displaying an error complaining that you don't have cookies enabled in your browser. (and there's no setting that I could find that can change this behavior)
Finding a browser that isn't Chromium/Webkit based is getting much more difficult, as time goes on.
(this is another example of why monopolies are bad and diversity is good)
There's the obvious choice of using IE, but that's not really much of an option any more, and I wouldn't consider it for any modern HTML5 site, not even locally, because stuff just breaks or looks messed up, because IE just too old and janky to play well with newer things.
Then there's
Pale Moon, which had no trouble logging in, but it had compatibility issues with the Wordpress post editor, stuck in plain text mode, with no tabs to switch to view mode. That would work fine, if you can think in HTML, or only want to capture plain text, but being able to see your formatting as you compose your posts has obvious merits.
That left me with
K-Meleon, which for now (v75.1), is working pretty good, with both the site URL and working with Wordpress. This could change, once the Goanna engine (same as Pale Moon) becomes the default in the official stable release., though, so if you plan on doing something similar, grab a pre-Goanna portable version to squirrel away, just in case.
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