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What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

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IainB:
Re Clibu: "Clibu is completely free at this time. At some point we’ll charge - if you can afford a cup of coffee a month you’ll be able to afford to use Clibu."
Well, I can't.
-tsaint (September 23, 2019, 08:22 AM)
--- End quote ---
Have to agree. The "price of a cup of coffee" metaphor tends to be lazy and ignorant marketing BS spouted by con merchants. Why can't people do things for themselves?
I stopped buying coffees or taking clients to cafés and buying them coffees for a chat years ago, after totting up the annual cost on my marketing budget. I also detest coffee shops as they tend to lack privacy. Nowadays, I take 'em out for an occasional meal instead, and meet them for ad hoc chats in offices where we can discuss things in private and make the coffee, or tea, etc. ourselves in a kitchenette, from preselected ground coffee or preselected leaf teas.
At work or home, If I want a coffee or cup of tea (which may be be several times a day), then I make it myself, using my favourite fresh ground coffees or leaf teas selected from the supermarket (there's always a wide choice for coffee) and (for teas) a local Chinese supermarket. The price per cup is then very cheap, the quality is good and I have become quite good at making nice coffees/teas.
I have some very good Iranian friends whom I visit to give English lessons (conversational and written technical English). Always a pleasure, as the husband makes some of the best Persian-style coffee in the city (in my view). He's taught me how to do it too, but it's a definite skill. He's an MD, but he learned about making coffee whilst working in an Iranian cafe, from a purist coffee-maker as his teacher.

migla9:
Surfulater does not have any Export capability, so it isn't possible to Import it into our new app Clibu.
-nevf (September 11, 2019, 03:12 AM)
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While it's not possible for your paying customers to do this, as developer of both products, surely you do still have the Surfulater file format information to be able to import it into Clibu, should you chose to do so.

app103:
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.

What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

Table of Contents tab, which also features a search bar.

What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

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.

What are people using these days, instead of Surfulater?

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.

Shades:
I have no problem surfing with any browser on any system here internally to visit my 'internal only' mediawiki installation. Which can be accessed by typing the following: http://192.168.1.1/wiki     Works in FireFox, Palemoon, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer, Edge (both).

Chrome/Chromium-based browsers do have the issue as reported when using names. But that's because these browsers consult external DNS servers first and these don't know about your internally hosted website(s), so that ends up in a fail.

To combat that is to run your own DNS server internally and configure on your router (or the device that hands out the IP addresses in your LAN) to use the internal DNS server as primary and the external DNS server of your choice as secondary, tertiary etc. That's what I have done here and works for the Chrome/Chromium-based browsers.

Way too much effort for a standard home network setup? Sure. But you must keep the Chrome/Chromium-based browser fanatics appeased. Even if you can show that FF is the better browser in this regard.

app103:
Even if you can show that FF is the better browser in this regard.
-Shades (September 26, 2019, 12:08 PM)
--- End quote ---

But isn't the current FF Chromium based?

In any case, I did manage to fix the issue, without running my own DNS server internally or configuring anything in my router (which isn't as power user friendly as most, and can only be configured by logging into ISP's website)

I attacked the problem as a cookie issue, rather than a DNS issue, and was able to fix it with an additional line in my wp-config file.  Found solutions to other similar problems and put it all in a blog post.

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