The internet contains a wealth of information and can be very useful when you’re searching for something, while programming, or debugging, or fixing a problem.

But some things I seem to be looking up regularly, like the numbers of characters you can store in a TEXT field in MySQL – I can never remember whether I need a TEXT or MEDIUMTEXT data type. On other occasions, the information is hard to find and if you finally get to it, you can bookmark the page, only to find out a few months later that the page no longer exists. I wanted to know which buttons to press on a HP Deskjet 6980 to do a cartridge realignment. It took a while to find that information, so I wanted to store that somewhere.

Basically, I needed my own wiki, to be able to quickly note down things that I probably would need in the future. A bit to my surprise, setting one up was extremely simple. At http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki, you can find all you need to set up MediaWiki, the free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia.

Just following the installation instructions, I was able to set it up in minutes. You can check it out at http://www.krisgielen.be/wiki. 

I pretty much used the standard configuration. These are the custom settings that I added to LocalSettings.php:

// no anonymous editing, creating of pages or creating of talks
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createpage'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createtalk'] = false;  

// users that want to edit, need to confirm their email address first
$wgEmailConfirmToEdit = true;

// replaced the logo with a logo of my own
$wgLogo = '/mediawiki/wikilogo.png';

I also wanted to get some usage statistics, so I added the Google Analytics extension.