Title: Page 50 – Alex Kirk

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 * 
   ## 󠀁[Keeping Family History with WordPress](https://alex.kirk.at/2022/08/31/keeping-family-history-with-wordpress/)󠁿
   
 * August 31, 2022
 * One thing that I like very much about my family is the anecdotes and stories.
   One thing that I am bad at, is reciting them.
   So I had this idea to create something
   like a private [Wikipedia](https://wikipedia.org/) for my family, where each 
   person has their own page and family members can contribute to the stories, biographical
   data, and media.
 * Initially, I set up a [MediaWiki](https://www.mediawiki.org/), i.e. the same 
   software that Wikipedia uses. It turns out, it’s not that easy to configure. 
   The new Wiki editor is much better than directly editing wiki syntax but the 
   complexity is high for a small project like that. Also, uploading media is quite
   a pain because of the importance of licensing metadata. In a private wiki, you’ll
   want the UI to get out of the way.
 * So, since I work with [WordPress](https://wordpress.org/) a lot, I had the idea
   to use WordPress for it. There are a number of wiki plugins for WordPress but
   they all seemed overly complex and not really geared towards a use case of users
   collaborating on creating a site.
 * Thus, I created my own WordPress plugin called [Family Wiki](https://github.com/akirk/family-wiki/),
   available for now at [https://github.com/akirk/family-wiki/](https://github.com/akirk/family-wiki/)
 * WordPress has the advantage that you can set it up very quickly and got many 
   options for setting it up. Plus, when you have already multiple blogs (e.g. for
   family members) on your domain, it’s easy to just add another blog to your WordPress
   multisite. The plugin works on a standalone blog, too.
 * Here are some screenshots that I made as a demo:
 * [[
 * A homepage showing a missing wiki page.
 * [[
 * A person page with a missing wiki page
 * [[
 * Gutenberg view of a person page with the shortcodes
 * [[
 * A 404 page exposing the “Create Page” link in the header
 * [[
 * A person page with external links
 * [[
 * A calendar page
 * [[
 * Inserting a birthday calendar block
 * [Personal](https://alex.kirk.at/category/personal/), [WordPress](https://alex.kirk.at/category/wordpress/)
 * May 2, 2022
 * I just reacted with ⭐️ on [Increasing the surface area of blogging](https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/21/new-rss/).
 * [Web](https://alex.kirk.at/category/web/)

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