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How do you keep your technical docs / howtos organized and searchable ?

Like all admins, I have a large variety of HOWTOs, shortcuts, notes, and lessons-learned from running a bunch of systems and software over the years.

What are folks using these days to keep that stuff around and organized ?

Some features I'm looking for are:

  • searchable
  • ability to cross-link pages together easily and point to Internet references
  • ability to embed formatted code snippets in a page easily without trashing their line breaks etc.
  • web interface ideally to read them
  • easy to backup to Dropbox or equivalent
  • ideally some kind of good gui-capable editor that doesn't drive me crazy
  • ability to occasionally link in a screenshot
  • hopefully no 'make docs' required - edit and view right away

I've done wiki implementations in past with mediawiki/confluence and the gui editors are always the weak spot for me. Something about needing to dump a db to save my data for safekeeping bugs me too, but I guess it's a small annoyance.

I took a day to put a dozen or so pages of notes into Wordpress via a vagrant VM and it's ok i guess.....but the gui editor is just horrible to use and it takes forever to create a simple page since the gui keeps destroying my formatting. If I need to edit in straight html so Wordpress doesn't nuke my formatting, I'm not sure it's worth the pain and underlying complexity.

I'm almost leaning toward just doing a bunch of pages in a git repo and pushing them up to someplace offsite, but I have to think there's a better way.

I guess I'm struggling with needing to go back to the 1980s and markup languages in order to create a usable cross-linked searchable web (or wiki) when what I'd really like is something WYSIWIG that doesn't drive me crazy.

Ideas ?

submitted by vinceskahan
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