Large-scale, free and open source packet capturing has (or more accurately at the time of the project's inception, had) a big problem. There was no ready-made solution for indexing traffic in plain-old .pcap files. There had been attempts made in the past to remedy this, some of which you can read about in the project's readme. However, they were all either abandoned or supremely convoluted. I wanted to address this with a small, portable, fast program, which eventually became pichi.

Now that the phenomenal arkime exists, this is no longer the case. Nevertheless, I plan on updating and patching pichi for as long as I can, purely to provide people with a feasible alternative.

Philosophy

If you do a quick search online for web content management systems and blogging platforms, you'll find that there seems to be an option for every mood. Many claim to be simple and turn-key, boasting a plethora of features to make your life easier. But what happens when the software loses favor and it's development stagnates? What about vendor lock-in thanks to the proprietary storage format of your data? How many times will you have to migrate and recover? How closely linked are the dozens of add-ons and the content which it serves?

Wambenger is a project to simplify content publishing and to decouple content from platform. There are only three formats used, and they are used solely for their intended purpose -- markdown for content, html5 for markup, and css for style. They are also all entirely plaintext, which serves a few purposes. Mainly it ensures the future-proofing of the content published. The source of truth is markdown, which is enormously portable and convertable, as well as human-readable. All other content (images, videos, audio, etc.) is stored in it's native format.

While there are already a great number of projects out there that fit some or all of these criteria, I'm a strong believer in having a plurality of options available in the open source ecosystem. Maybe I'll get a few things right where others have mis-stepped. Maybe I'll get every last thing wrong. Either way, the journey is part of the reward.

See Also

• microblog.pub, an ActivityPub-powered microblog.
• grav, a simple file-based web platform.
• blag, a blog-aware static site generator.