PBWiki revisited

[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.