Introducing MDWiki: A Front‑End‑Only Markdown Wiki for Lightweight Documentation and Personal Blogs

The article begins with a personal background, describing early attempts at building a personal knowledge base that eventually failed due to data loss, and a later experiment with BlogEngine and WordPress that proved cumbersome.

Realising the advantages of Markdown for notes, articles, and e‑books, the author discovered MDWiki in 2015 on GitHub and decided to use it for a lightweight blog and documentation site.

MDWiki is a pure front‑end solution: it parses Markdown files in the browser using markedjs , styles the output with Bootstrap , and adds features like highlightjs for code syntax highlighting. The core tech stack includes jQuery , Bootswatch , colorbox , and is written in TypeScript (post‑0.6.x).

Deployment is straightforward—simply place the four required files ( config.json , index.html , index.md , navigation.md ) together with your Markdown content on any web server or static‑site host such as GitHub Pages, Google Drive, Dropbox, or IIS.

Typical workflow: edit Markdown locally (e.g., with VS Code or Notepad++), commit and push with git push , then the site updates instantly. The author provides a step‑by‑step guide for creating a GitHub repository, configuring navigation.md , and enabling GitHub Pages via the repository settings.

Extensions discussed include integrating the Disqus comment system (via a [gimmick:Disqus](…) line in navigation.md ), adding previous/next navigation links, and embedding Application Insights for monitoring.

For developers who wish to customize MDWiki, the source can be built locally using nodejs , npm , grunt , bower , and typescript . Build commands are: npm install npm install grunt-cli bower install grunt release (or ./node_modules/.bin/grunt debug release ). The build artifacts are generated in the master or 0.6.x branches.

The article also mentions the use of pandoc for converting legacy reStructuredText documents to Markdown, and outlines future plans to integrate MDWiki with Azure DevOps Server (TFS) Wiki and automated pipelines.