Here's how to set up a static wiki or blog using ikiwiki with no hosting fees. Everything is hosted on github, both the git repository and the web site. Your laptop is used to generate and publish changes to it.

This is possible because github now supports github pages.

Note that github limits free accounts to 100 mb of git storage. It's unlikely that a small wiki or blog will outgrow this, but we are keeping two copies of the website in git (source and the compiled site), and all historical versions too. So it could happen. If it does, you can pay github for more space, or you can migrate your site elsewhere.

Github Setup

Local Setup

Publishing to Github

Your wiki will show up at http://$YOU.github.com/ within ten minutes after the first push, and changes you push to it from then on should show up immediately.

Enhancements

You can follow the instructions in laptop wiki with git to set up an editable version of your wiki on your laptop. Then you can use the web interface for editing. You'll still need to follow the instructions above to publish your changes to github.

It would also be possible to teach ikiwiki to push compiled pages to github itself via a plugin, as was done with the amazon s3 plugin. Not done yet!