Deliberate Limitations
Deliberate limitations of Bolzano
Most wikis allow you to write a link with a title that’s different from the page name or URL, so that, for example, you can replace a long URL with a single word.
Like the original wiki (http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors),,) Bolzano disallows this. (That sentence makes a good example. In most wikis, you could abbreviate that link to Something Shorter,](http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors),) Bolzano disallows this. (That sentence makes a good example. In most wikis, you could abbreviate that link to [Something Shorter.html), but in Bolzano you can’t.)
This restriction is completely deliberate, and it has a lot to do with what makes a wiki a wiki. A non-wiki web site should, ideally, look neat, and being able to give titles to links can help with that. But a wiki is different. A wiki should be optimised for making writing as easy as possible. That means minimising decisions. So the name of a link is the link itself. Nothing to think about there. Move along.
One complication to this limitation is that it’s not actually enforced. Sometimes you really need to make these named links that I don’t like, and when you need to you can. See the full Markdown syntax at http://daringfireball.net/projects/Markdown/syntax.php to see how. But if you find you’re spending longer making your edits, then I’m going to say I told you so.
Bolzano uses only very simple programming techniques. For example, it keeps each page as a separate file on disk rather than in a database. This is deliberate. For the reasons for this, see Bolzano Technical Apologia.
If you insist on using a more powerful wiki despite my warning that doing so will cut your productivity, I recommend CloudWiki, which is slightly more powerful and the next best compromise in my opinion, or PmWiki, which is fairly easy to install and has oodles of features.
