I've been wondering what to do with the wiki associated with this blog; being able to draft blog entries on the train using ikiwiki is a clear win, but I have too many choices for tools to organize information: my exploding todo list is kept in org-mode, for example.

This week, though, an opportunity presented itself: I was reminded that I'd agreed to present some undergraduate project ideas to our students on the Science without Borders scheme, and of course had totally failed to prepare anything (which, come to think of it, is perhaps not the best advertisement for org-mode – but I think it's my current use of it that's wrong). Luckily, because of SBCL's participation in Google Summer of Code, I already had a useful template, so it was a matter of a few tens of minutes of work to construct a page with a list of student projects that I'd be interested in supervising. (I didn't actually have tens of minutes to spare before I had to give the talk, unfortunately; on the other hand it's quite nice to present without being bound by a fixed agenda of slideware and bullet-points).

I'm resisting (fairly easily, for now) the temptation to use advanced ikiwiki features, having one page per project, each individually tagged and then inlining them in some complicated way – but this might come, as and when students (or anyone else on the lazyweb!) take up these projects and make progress. On the more general point of which tool contains which information, I think it's fairly clear that project ideas which don't have to be kept confidential for whatever reason could usefully be public by default; there's probably no immediate benefit – it's not as if I expect my readership to obsessively check for idea updates – but it might make for a slightly less panicky project pitch presentation.