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by mojombo 1716 days ago
Fun to see this on HN! I originally created Gollum to power GitHub's wiki system and wanted to see if we could use Git to make our wikis more powerful AND more open. I thought it would be cool if you could just clone your GitHub wiki and modify it locally or export it to some other system if you needed, or have it all locally for an airplane trip without wifi.

Another interesting thing is that I used my Readme Driven Development method to develop it, which you can see in the Readme of the first commit: https://github.com/gollum/gollum/commit/c7875704971be998a539.... I wrote it before writing a single line of code and found it worked nicely to figure out the API and feel out the ergonomics of the text format. More on that approach here: https://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/08/23/readme-driven-deve...

Glad to see the project alive and well!

3 comments

I skimmed the README and didn't find a way for Gollum to export to static HTML files only for viewing purposes, say hosting on GitHub/GitLab pages.

I've been looking for a similarly simplistic git-based wiki which works much like Jekyll/Pelican/Hugo.

I never knew that my default approach is called readme-driven development :)
I guess building from specifications is so rare in software, we forgot how it's called.

  nano-waterfall  (nWF) - README.md -Driven Development
  micro-waterfall (μWF) - ARCHITECTURE.md -Driven Development
  mini-waterfall  (mWF) - plan→build (iterate)→ship
  full waterfool  (FWF) - "you went full waterfool, never go full waterfool"
I had forgotten you wrote both Jekyll *and* Gollum.

I'm writing the next generation of Jekyll, called Svekyll, which is Jekyll plus Svelte: "the radical simplicity of Jekyll + the futuristic power of Svelte"

https://svekyll.com

I know it has been hard for you to get in on the ground floor of things, but this is your chance if you want to invest. I'm building a publishing company with Svekyll as the starting point, but with a few extra twists coming soon. Could we jump on a call and I'll share the roadmap?