From: Amitai Schlair <schmonz@magnetic-babysitter.(none)>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:27:53 +0000 (-0400)
Subject: why I needed this, in case it's useful to someone else
X-Git-Tag: 3.1415926~79^2~2
X-Git-Url: http://git.tremily.us/?a=commitdiff_plain;h=80ca685385cd827f19718eaea5fb772782f68d3b;p=ikiwiki.git

why I needed this, in case it's useful to someone else
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+## A use case
+
+Why I needed this plugin: I have two web servers available to me
+for a project. Neither does everything I need, but together they
+do. (This is a bit like the [Amazon S3
+scenario](http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/running_a_wiki_on_Amazon_S3/).)
+
+Server (1) is a university web server. It provides plentiful space
+and bandwidth, easy authentication for people editing the wiki, and
+a well-known stable URL. The wiki really wants to live here and
+very easily could except that the server doesn't allow arbitrary
+CGIs.
+
+Server (2) is provided by a generous alumnus's paid [[tips/DreamHost]]
+account. Disk and particularly network usage need to be minimized
+because over some threshold it costs him. CGI, etc. are available.
+
+My plan was to host the wiki on server (1) by taking advantage of
+server (2) to store the repository, source checkout, and generated
+pages, to host the repository browser, and to handle ikiwiki's CGI
+operations. In order for this to work, web edits on (2) would need
+to automatically push any changed pages to (1).
+
+As a proof of concept, I added an rsync post-commit hook after
+ikiwiki's usual. It worked, just not for web edits, which is how
+the wiki will be used. So I wrote this plugin to finish the job.
+The wiki now lives on (1), and clicking "edit" just works.