Dawn of the Geeks

Cubia

Cubia is a lightweight wikipedia mirror. Lightweight meaning that ever a server running at less than 1Ghz could easily handle it. It’s called “Cubia” because the main page is just a hexadecimal cube with 256 links. Each of those links will take you to a listing of all the articles in the selected section limited to 200 articles per page.

The process of loading Cubia involves first uploading 6.6GB of entries split between nearly 600 files. Each of those files then has to be read in and the data injected into the database. The entire process can take several days. But, once it’s done Google (and every other search engine) will have no trouble indexing the millions of pages that Wikipedia has. Visitors will then come from search engines and land directly on the page they’re looking for. Because it’s lightweight, even a slow server will give them what they want quickly.

Because the entire page is encoded in the database it’s quick and easy to pull it out and display the wiki page to the user. The side effect is that it’s impossible to have a search engine on the site that does full text. The only searchable part in the database is the title. But, that doesn’t really matter because again, people will be using Google, Yahoo, etc which are indexing what the user sees. We’ll see how well this little experiment does over the next month or so.