Infinite Machine

Infinite Machine has features similar to other wikis, namely Wikipedia and DokuWiki. Here are some of the major features that have been implemented.

The primary component of Infinite Machine is a wiki parser. A key feature I wanted in my website software is the ability to write content in wiki-like syntax instead of HTML. I settled on the Creole specification, and Infinite Machine uses the parser from python-creole.

See the syntax page for examples.

Document content and resources for documents, such as document-specific images, are read directly from a git repository. This has wonderful side effects and avoids reinventing the wheel for content management. Publishing can be as easy as pushing to a repository.

Efficiency is an important element in Infinite Machine's design. Fetching, parsing and rendering pages is costly, often taking several hundred milliseconds for a single page request. Therefore, caching is essential. Memcached is used to reduce the request time to a few milliseconds.

When source code is included in a document, it is easy to add syntax highlighting in infmx. The Pygments library is used to highlight code snippets like this:

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#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
  printf("syntax highlighting is awesome\n");
  return 0;
}

In true wiki spirit, Infinite Machine extracts the document title, summary, and headers to be displayed individually by a template. The summary is considered to be everything between the title header and the second level header. The table of contents is automatically generated from the header information and is displayed after the summary, as shown at the top of this page.

Infinite Machine is an open source project. It is hosted on GitHub at http://github.com/msparks/infinitemachine.

It can be cloned with:

git clone git://github.com/msparks/infinitemachine.git

No fancy documentation is available yet. Infinite Machine is still new and may not be ready for general use, but feel free to submit bugs and patches.