Why a personal wiki
I tried Twitter but never managed to enjoy it.
Part of it is that I used it as a purely profesional tool. I’ve done my share of personal tweeting before that, but even that way, it doesn’t ring true. Here’s what I was feeling didn’t work:
- Feedback loops (retwees, likes, whatever you prefer) are embeded.
- Judgement (and expression of judgment) requires little to no effort. In fact, opinions have such a low cost that Twitter has become notoriously toxic.
- The algorithm dictates the topic of the day. You also get sucked into consuming information you are not interested in if you are not careful.
- Engagement metrics make you optimize content towards engagement, if you play the game of the site. Then, if you don’t: why use Twitter?
Oppose this to:
- No engagement mechanics mean any information contained in a personal wiki is not so heavily scrutinized - you are allowed to be wrong and make mistakes, or leave things unfinished.
- You can refer to your own past knowledge in an organized, interrelational way. See, for details on this, the Zettelkasten page.
- You learn some things and take a real, self-owned part on the internet - in your own terms.
These characteristics foster, ideally, self-improvement and concept mapping, helping consolidate knowledge.
Goals
- Short and mid term: none other than store passing thoughts and interests. Consistency will be key to this experiment.
- Long term: to let ideas grow on their own (already noticing that!).
- Include a node map with backlinking, tag counts.
Technical architecture
This wiki is just a collection of tagged markdown files in an hugo static site. It used to be hosted in github pages, but now it lives in a home webserver, with the ultimate goal of going full autonomous with solar power and a battery. I use hugo to generate the static content from markdown files, and some rsync magic to automatically update things as I change them, so that deployment is seamless.
The theme of this site is a slightly modified version of researcher, by ojroques. Some of these modifications are listed here.
Results
- I learned some principles of css and web-hosting.
- I pay more attention to my passing thoughts.
- Having a log helps me listen and play to music more consistently. I also write more.
- Some ideas wouldn’t have happened without note rereading.