Just as in a book, this page is designed to help describe the tools used to create this website and what methods were used to give it its look and feel.

What we see today is the junction of two different branches: the original static HTML pages and the wiki pages.

Static HTML Pages

In November 2008, the Hurd's old static web pages were merged into the wiki pages' repository. After a lot of cleansing work, on 2008-11-22 the joined set of pages was made available for serving the official GNU Hurd web appearance at http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/.

Wiki Pages

Rev. I

We used a particular implementation (or clone) of Wiki software called TWiki. The wiki was reachable at http://hurd.gnufans.org/.

A generic WikiWikiWeb, or simply Wiki, is "a collaborative forum where people can share ideas and record any consensus reached on difficult issues, along with rebuttal. It changes as people come and go, as experience develops, and as opinions change." The TWiki software is an enhanced descendent of the original WikiWikiWeb.

We used the GNU Skin.

The site began in May 2002 as one TWiki web: Hurd. This WebHome page was used as the front page of the whole site. We grew this site and added more TWiki webs by December 2002. Due to the success of the site we had to act with respect to more completely addressing copyright issues. More people started adding content.

The gnufans site's administrators would eventually step back from maintenance of their wiki installation, so from roughly 2005 on, day-to-day tasks like processing new user's registrations or spam removal would not be done in a timely fashion anymore. In July 2006, the slow burial of the Hurd Wiki was announced.

Rev. II

Considering this from April 2006 on already, on 2007-08-12 the conversion of the TWiki content to a format usable by ikiwiki was finally finished. Read about the twiki to ikiwiki conversion.

This wiki instance was running distributed over two GNU/Hurd machines, flubber (Git repository) and snubber (web server), both hosted by Barry deFreese.

The wiki's content also provides that of the official GNU Hurd pages, http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/.

Rev. III

As of early 2013, both flubber and snubber's duties are taken over by Richard Braun's darnassus.