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PBWiki revisited

by David M. Doolin, PhD on June 11, 2008

[Update 6/11/2008] I have been using PBWiki for a few months now, and I am very pleased overall. I do have a large number of what would be considered “feature requests” (e.g., Mediawiki importing would be tops), but overall I consider it money well spent.

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I just purchased a monthly PBWiki plan for $9.95 without even test driving the interface. I don’t really need to anyway. I was a very early contributer to wikipedia (back in the Larry Sanger days) and totally “get” the value of wikis. I even run several instances of Mediawiki locally. I also purchased the “Hideable Pages” options for an extra $2/month.

I did not purchase “Lockable Pages” for an extra $4/month. I might well have at $2/month.

Here’s why. Four dollars per month doesn’t sound like a whole lot of money. It’s what, a jumbo latte? However, in a subscription it adds up in time. More importantly, adding “just $4″ to every subscription based software service I use really would increase my monthly IT expenditures.

More importantly, for anyone offering software as a service, what I am paying for is backups, not little-used features.

Backups. That’s it.

Automatic backups

Having automatic, offsite backups is the only reason I am moving off my locally installed (on siteground.com) dotproject, mediawiki, etc. I have the skill and capability to install and operate all of the services, but it’s not worth my time in overhead if I can find a reasonable alternative. Since Wordpress provides automatic backups, I will continue to use it locally.

My most pressing need now is having the ability to operate with intermittent connectivity. I want to be able to sit on the beach up in Marin, far away from even cell phone coverage, and bill a few hours work between surf sessions (greetz to all my wonderful clients, you know who you are!). I am sure this capability is a simple matter of programming…

Finally, kudos to PBWiki for both excellent pricing and OpenID capability.

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Acquiring My Money As Your customer | There Is NO Box
August 6, 2009 at 2:10 pm

{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Jean-Philippe Daigle July 16, 2008 at 1:25 pm

I fully agree with the one reason being paying for backups. I used to run a mail server at home. And crm114 for spam filtering. And host photo galleries at home. And SVN, etc.

Now it’s GMail for email, GCal for scheduling, and Flickr (pro account) for photos. It’s awesome to just stop worrying about backups and connectivity.

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admin July 16, 2008 at 1:29 pm

Jp,

Thanks, and good to hear from you again!

-dave

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