I’m a new ikiwiki user. I’ve been interested in using this, because of the git version control, and I liked the idea that I could just clone the entire ikiwiki on my laptop and thus edit it offline with my favourite editor.

So, as every new user, I make some mistakes which could have been pretty easily avoided. Here’s one quite significant.

In order to generate the ?timeline I use the aggregate plugin. That way I can pull content from lots of sources through feeds, and put it into one page and one feed. This timeline is like a big feed of things I do everywhere on the web. In a way, it’s a PESOS approach in the IndieWeb.

One important technical detail is that the directive displays information on the page itself, such as when was the last time the source feed was checked. This means that each time the feeds are checked, the page that contains the directive has to rebuild in order to update the information.

Obviously, it was a very bad idea for the timeline, because that meant that each time the sources were checked, the whole timeline has to rebuild whole over again. And it took CPU time.

The people running http://branchable.com fixed it for me. Thanks to them! I’ll make sure to use it as a reminder and have separate files for that in the future!

If you have other tips to make ikiwiki more efficient, please comment!