Wiki
Wikis are tree-based tools for representing hierarchies of information.
This personal wiki is the one I maintain. Others refer to personal wikis as Digital Gardens, Brain Dumps, or Personal Libraries.
The source of this wiki can be found at https://github.com/jakeisnt/wiki.
Motivation
Organization
I needed a way to better organize my ideas. Administering structure to my data was a good way to do this, and org-mode provides a good facility for this. Further, the constraints administered by the website motivate me to better organize my notes as they're visible to the public; without this structure the notes won't even render properly.
Accessibility
I'd like my notes to be easily visible to anyone. It allows me to easily share my thoughts and perspectives with friends or colleagues.
Publicity
This portal also enables recruiters or future collaborators to learn more about me, my skills and my interests. Perhaps I can build a following, inspire someone, or find an interesting job opportunity if someone stumbles upon this wiki.
Ideas
https://years.cblgh.org/ Briefly summarize what you've done each month and year! This is excellent for reflection, learning and growth. It can be easily contrasted with goals. I think that doing this on a monthly basis would be much more helpful than yearly; perhaps I could introduce some tags to the wiki that would help catalogue this.
- https://www.brendanschlagel.com/2017/11/05/canonize-creating-personal-canon-template/
Add a personal canon; catalogue the things that have had the most impact on you. This could be difficult but it's worth goingthrough the effort! Would be great to do some justice to each thing that's inspired you.
- https://phse.net/values/
Cataloguing a list of values on the website seems incredibly value for myself or for others. These ideas are definitely admirable. (Making connections with other people has a higher return than making good work, it seems!)
Design
- tags
The design of this wiki has gone through multiple phases.
I started with a Hugo template, adding browsing features in multiple panes to the site, but Hugo proved to be too complex of a tool to sustainably use in the long term.
The current iteration of this site is generated with a Pandoc-based tool I've written myself, as I felt I wanted more customizability. Eventually, I'd like to generate multiple front-ends for the website -- so that visitors can view it as a wiki, as a traditional blog, a series of journals, or something in between -- depending on how they view the website.
References
I've taken inspiration from several others who maintain wikis.
Tommy Morriss first introduced me to the idea with his personal (private) wiki.
Jethro has easily accessible articles and templates that I've made use of to put this together.
100 Rabbits publish all of their notes and information in a custom wiki framework. Logseq is a really cool tool for maintaining a personal knowledge basin that syncs effortlessly with GitHub. https://github.com/kormyen/memex
Further Inspiration
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes?stackedNotes=zUw5PuD8op9oq8kHvni6sug6eRTNtR9Wqma
https://royniang.com/ has an excellent wiki with a ton of great ideas. Good style! Worth linking Personal Websites.
Stanford's psychology wiki is detailed and easy to navigate.
Frank McSherry's blog is maintained entirely by .md files in a journal with a simple markdown index. Git is the UI. https://twtxt.net/ is an interesting microblogging platform
- https://codeberg.org/Valenoern/bopwiki
a small wiki implemented entirely in a DSL that's been written in common lisp!
- https://blot.im/
blog with your favorite text editor, publish to the service. Basically a static site generator?
https://azlen.me/ is an excellent second brain. They're an admirable writer with loads worth following.
https://github.com/jackmcdade/secret-public-journal https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog https://github.com/bphenriques/knowledge-base elisp wiki https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge https://github.com/karlicoss/beepb00p https://github.com/bennetthardwick/website https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge -- i love the idea of visualizing the ralations of the notes as well as his rationale https://github.com/aceyoung9/garden https://github.com/binyamin/eleventy-garden
Notes
https://jlelse.blog/posts/wiki-approach/ cool wiki approach :: find the best method for me ! I think writing a blog post is the best way to help me organize my thoughts, i should get that infrastructure up. nextcloud notes is also a good option, but i do have to set up a nextcloud server to handle that https://dpitt.me/blog/2020/03/zettelkasten/ obsidian md knowledge base The Brain is a digital memory solution written and maintained by the brother of Acronym's founder, Errolson,for many years. It's not well known in the technology space, but it's popular with creatives and researchers who often don't intersect with the field.
organization
https://todaytakeseverything.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/the-bullet-journal-bulletproof/ doing things once a day and putting them in a bullet journal or something https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/1vn6uk/thoughts_on_the_meditations_by_marcus_aurelius/ https://www.veilance.com/gb/en/shop/mens/isogon-mx-jacket https://www.srid.ca/689c4a39.html bulletproof web app for notes; uses reflex frp and obelisk framewrok https://reflex-frp.org/ haskell web framework; uses tech called obsidian. feels very opinionated? not sure whether it is good or not http://shpadoinkle.org/docs/getting-started/index.html some ui library someone is very passionate about, it is unclear whether it is good or worthwhile https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-tiddlywiki https://seekr.github.io/zettel/#colophon
gossip's web: a directory of home-grown personal websites, experiments and writing https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Transclusion#overview both the subject of transclusion: the inclusion of one document in another - and the wiki itself are super good here http://outliners.scripting.com/ 40 years of outliners https://github.com/TymonZ/garden
working with the garage door up :: why we should learn with wikis in the open.
site map!
related tags!
backlinks!
resoures!
activity graph for research or projects! i love how this wiki looks and feels uses PARA method of organizing information and a feed! god this shit is so good and a table of contents but everything is hidden out of the way! IBM plex mono is almost there - but not quite
hypothesis: a margin with conversations anywhere on the web! i cannot stress how cool this is, particularly the trick with the sidebar https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ http://mindforger.com/: markdown-powered wiki software
concrete plan
learn to build small software! a wiki is the best way to do this.
write a basic org-mode parser in ANSI C and C++ supports links, `#+title`, nested bullets, etc. fairly simple to start.
with inspiration from devine's wiki, integrate this parser into a service that parses things out to html, also written in ANSI C
continue to rewrite in rust and other languages, like zig perhaps, for fun and to learn more programming
experiment with a file format other than org under the hood; something with an equivalent level of expression but much simpler [i don't use most of the features of org here anyways; org feels like it's doing too much as a file format, and i use different subsets of the format in different ways]
would be cool to use a babel-adjacent technology to be able to convert to file formats compatible with other platforms on the fly.
experiments
figure out the best way to do project management. learn more about the mailing list strategy adn see how that compares to a `TODO.org` approach that I've been using in a few of my projects to take notes and ideas.
build hyper specific tools to interact with my wiki in different ways to enforce certain ways of integrating with it: adding a new idea, journal entry, or something similar for example. emacs is a nice interface and should be worked on, but it shouldn't be the only one. small, portable `.sh` scripts could be fun to experiment with here.
ideas
List of artists and hackers using homegrown time-tracking tools https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden https://github.com/drichard/mindmaps
https://joplinapp.org/ open source note taking and todo app local first self-hosted wiki tool (dendron) knowledge base from nikita second brain digital gardeners https://github.com/seanbreckenridge/exobrain https://github.com/jsjoeio/joeprevite.com notes for people we keep in touch with
open source wiki Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead Kate on Twitter: "Making regexp -> NFA compilation faster by constructin
https://github.com/schollz/cowyo neat, encrypted wiki! Code Samples - Impredicative Wiki Wiki bphenriques/knowledge-base: Personal Wiki Introduction - Everything I know
This FTP site knowledge/wiki-workflow.md at master · nikitavoloboev/knowledge Building a digital garden Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create.
Marcin Ignac on Twitter: "I'm fascinated by @andymatuschak digital garden https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/about.html https://billdemirkapi.me/
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring a webring for static site generators, allows for generating a webring from a list of RSS feeds to join the sites together
kormyen/memex https://github.com/bphenriques/knowledge-base https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/ http://okmij.org/ftp/ Memex 1.1 | John Naughton's online diary https://mboxed.github.io/sodatsu/#home
A gardening guide for your mind • Mental Nodes
Collected Notes. https://bismuth.garden/now anotherPersonal Websites and wiki https://libarynth.org/start
https://beepb00p.xyz/exobrain/#table-of-contents very cool, simple wiki with an indexable menu
https://marcus-obst.de/wiki/Notetaking opinionated wiki advice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24108466 iterative approach to notes
some new wiki ideas from issues
'see the diff for this section': click the button to see the page diff visualized over time. inspired by this: https://mbuffett.com/posts/bevy-snake-tutorial/
show 'last modified'
estimate reading time
add link to newsletter signup
display stats on the main page:
number of words
number of pages
number of links between pages
extract tags from each file and display things in sub-pages throughout the wiki according to tags. this needs some exploration, and could be interfaced with in addition to backlinks. this needs some investigation - how can i fuse with other distributed wiki ideas?
(only with rust rewrite): support evaluation of code blocks during generation. integrate with nix to install and use the right programs to run
(rust) export to gemini system, host on gemini server
ways to visualize history throughout the file to show what's changed over time! perhaps a 'changed recently' as well
goula.sh
https://goula.sh/ some excellent ideas
millions of tags!
lots of side notesz
feature highlights throughout the notes, interweaving them with the writing can i write public texts on the web?
uses links as nodes, cataloguing references to them throughout the writing. i can't read too much into this though - or i will begin to lose creativity!
tracking aesthetics on one wiki page: https://thomasorus.com/aesthetics.html
love the time graph here! maybe I should spend more time tracking. i want a solution that does this in the background, though, to a degree...
https://arcana.computer/catalogs/media-diet: track a more consistent media diet. perhaps this is possible with my review system in conjunction with git (and emails i have sent myself) ?