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✨jes✨

slowly realizing that the wikis serve individuals way better than blogs

wikis map more naturally to the brain & are way lower effort. my wiki already feels more like an extension of me than my blog ever has

can't believe it took me this long to feel that out

i have seen several ppl make a personal blog & struggle to write posts for it

i think those ppl would have way more success with a wiki

i think the wiki should be the default option for a personal website. it somehow feels simpler.

55 comments
gustav

@j3s Are there any good static site generators for wikis? I might give it a try to see how it feels, I never seem to have the inspiration to write a blog or log post about what I'm up to..

✨jes✨

@gustav not that i know of. i'm hosting github.com/bouncepaw/mycorrhiz on a little server of mine & it feels lightweight enough

BT Writes Code

@gustav I personally use Docusaurus (deployed via Vercel), but I'll be the first to admit it's not for everyone. There's a reliance on things being in a folder structure, which is a bit against the idea of a wiki. It's been a good place for me to dump thoughts and links though.

The digital garden communities are good places to look for resources. You might find something that strikes your fancy there.

This might be a good place to start 👇
github.com/MaggieAppleton/digi

@gustav I personally use Docusaurus (deployed via Vercel), but I'll be the first to admit it's not for everyone. There's a reliance on things being in a folder structure, which is a bit against the idea of a wiki. It's been a good place for me to dump thoughts and links though.

The digital garden communities are good places to look for resources. You might find something that strikes your fancy there.

Diane 🕵

@gustav @j3s

What about ikiwiki.info/

I think org-mode with or without org-roam can spit out something very wiki like as well.

✨jes✨

@alienghic @gustav

whatever works for u!

i dislike using git, except for software development. it's clumsy & most of the time i'm on the web and just wanna press "edit" and save.

i really need my wiki to be as low effort as possible & aesthetically pleasing

but there's a fine balance between something that feels good (mycorrhiza) and something that feels bloated (anything built from js frameworks, generally)

Diane 🕵

@j3s @gustav

There's a few other note taking things like roamresearch.com/ or obsidian.md/ that people have talked about providing functionality kind of like wikis.

The obsidian website looks kind of promising.

✨jes✨

@alienghic like i said, whatever works. i'm allergic to most nonfree software, but use much more evil proprietary shit. i just really don't want such a personal system to be not controlled by me.

Diane 🕵

@j3s

That's pretty much all i've got.

I think there's been efforts to port org-mode to other editors if you don't like emacs but do like free software.

✨jes✨

@alienghic i never gave org-mode a fair shake. i tried emacs a few times but bounced off 3:

:flan_reaper: - On Hiatus

@j3s I can always go back and edit a page on my digital garden if I think I got something wrong.

A blog post feels final. Like I can retract it, but it feels wrong to go in and edit it once it’s been sent out into the world.

✨jes✨

@lordbowlich yes. which make it very stressful to write, bc you feel like you have 1 shot to get it right

i like that a wiki can start small & grow incrementally, wherever your focus goes

blog posts have always felt like homework to me

baobao

@j3s@merveilles.town i built my own wiki cuz i wanted it to work a specific way that i think would be good for me but then turns out that it takes a lot of effort to actually write in it -3-

capital-ex

@j3s I make have to change to a wiki rather than a blog, lol. I am not very good at big one-shot writing post

Xerz! :blobcathearttrans:
@j3s oh yeah, my secret plan was to model my whole website like a VCS-oriented wiki-like thingie, what a coincidence :blobcatderpy:
bunnyhero+

@j3s @xerz oh huh i never considered this. hmmmm might try it

Chris has daddy issues

@j3s that's such a fun and creative idea, I like it! *take notes*

faun

@j3s Eventually (probably in 1 to 3 years, there have been lots of near-misses), someone's going to add subscribable feeds to a social wiki system, and the internet is going to become a much better place.

ploum

@j3s @sebsauvage : walked the exact opposite path.

Tried to have a personal wiki, this was a mess. My blog was thriving. For years, I tried to organize a zettelkasten, tried different personal wikis.

Until I realized that there was only one universal and intuitive way to sort thing: date. That everything I wanted to triage was already in my journal.

So I have both a blog and a journal and I’m slowly migrated all my wikis/notes to that format.

Rosano / Strolling

@ploum @j3s i relate a lot to this, created an app to 'turn text notes into a website' leaning toward the digital garden / wiki approach, but i'm now convinced that chronological experience is simpler for the reader and writer, as it's highly functional to 'resurface' evergreen ideas and/or chronological posts in context of current events. someone can explore the graph "from now on" instead of node-ing around.

@gordon balances these two approaches well with subconscious.substack.com

Julianoë

@j3s are you familiar with the concept of digital garden? On or two years ago I've discovered it through this post by @maggie and it was a real eye opener.
maggieappleton.com/garden-hist
I had the kind of feeling you just shared and digital garden was even more precisely defining a response to that. Wiki is like a tool. Digital Gardening is a way of approaching creating refining and sharing thoughts on the written internet. Really inspiring.

Julianoë

@j3s @maggie this then I've recreated a personal website mainly following this philosophy. It helped me a lot to share more things, and put things together gradually. I'm trying to keep blogging but the two are really different experiences.

Ash_Crow

@j3s I find #TiddlyWiki ( @TiddlyWiki ) particularly good for this (for personal use at least, online publication is more complicated with it)

Daniel Gill

@j3s this might be old hat to you, but the #PKM and #Obsidian community is literally all about exactly this, so you might find more resources over there helpful to you if you're interested in this kind of thing

[GRLC] (⁠^⁠.⁠_⁠.⁠^⁠)⁠ノ :neocat_flag_sapphic:
@j3s interesting thought

it's very true that wikis are better for infodumping and in a way you don't have to structure your thoughts as much, but in some other ways it's also a better format to organize knowledge

and the fact that it encourages going back and updating the content over time is also neat, rather than posting new articles

the "target audience" is also slightly different, since a personal wiki would primarily be for yourself, while a blog is written with the expectation of being read by others primarily
@j3s interesting thought

it's very true that wikis are better for infodumping and in a way you don't have to structure your thoughts as much, but in some other ways it's also a better format to organize knowledge
Rec. al alba

@j3s Wiki and blogs are forms, aspects about organization and analysis of ideas, but not its contents. Is not rare anyway the scarcity of content to write or to be able to write, because as many information societies produce as confusion and need to clarify all the chaotic information. And to clarify a bit some of the information, you need to be able to define who are you (at leas a little), where you come from, which is your social class, what are objectives, what is an essay, an article...

sam.sh

@j3s I have a large personal wiki, and I'm very tempted to publish the whole thing. But much of it is stream of consciousness. I'm not sure how to draw the line between private notes and a public wiki

TJ Radcliffe

@j3s That's very interesting! I've played around with wikis for a bunch of non-standard purposes (like world-building for books) and considered running one as a personal site, but never did it. This inspires me to reconsider!

kota

@j3s felt the same way. I hadn't written anything for my blog in nearly a year, but have been updating my wiki almost every day, so I wrote a little site generator for it last month, plopped my old blog posts into the wiki and setup some redirects. So much happier with it now.

✨jes✨

@kota cute, i love ur website!!! i like ur repos on sr.ht as well, i just tried using ur calendar thing & it failed in a hilarious way, for some reason it turned "j3s" into "j6s"

i shall investigate further 🧐

kota

@j3s lol oh no! I suspect it's from using go's date format detection thing poorly... Hmm might be a really easy fix

kota

@j3s ahhh that looks good! I'll merge that in, it was a bit silly to try to have the date configurable within the path because of course that means it'll break when there's folders with numbers in them

I also just realized I have a few local unpushed commits where I've added a help menu and some other stuff

At some point I still want to write a cronjob to read all my "future" journal entries and look for a format like "doctors app @2pm" so it can send me a notification when it's coming up

✨jes✨

@kota that's a v cool idea :3 i like it tons tbh, it's pretty close to my own home-grown todo system. i'm going to try using it for a little while & see how it feels, ty for making it!

kota

@j3s also thanks for making vore.website! It's been really nice to use and an inspiration in good functional design

✨jes✨

@kota you're welcome! i'm glad u like it. i'm honestly so proud of it 😭

it has its issues, but i hope i can improve it in meaningful ways, and prove to people that there is still room for a kinder, lighter, less exploitative web

i'm inspired by your projects too :3 calendar especially. i've been thinking about something like it for a long time. i'm also a big fan of ur wiki & recipes sites, and ur video hosting code. so much to explore!!

i'm gonna try ur peach cobbler recipe soon :uxn:

moh

@j3s I need to train myself to write less prosaically for my new wiki, so pages don't turn out somewhere between a blog post and an essay anyway

A myriad of Qyriad

@j3s I think one of the things that makes blogs so much more attractive for the *writer* is the lack of normative tone — you can talk as yourself and to the reader on a blog; most wikis don't accept that

:misa: Iki

@j3s out of curiosity, what are you using for wiki software? i have tried zim and had decent luck with it

meadowhawk

@j3s what a great idea, might have hunt down a wiki that allows me to write markdown. My only real requirement lol

R Scott Jones

@j3s I’ve found it useful to build a digital garden, then translate core ideas into finished blog posts. That’s the process that works best for me, thus far.

I think blogs are easier to consume for readers because they’re generally more complete, fully figured out ideas written more for an audience than oneself. #pkm #blogging #obsidian

Ed W8EMV

@rscottjones @j3s

For me at least blogs have a narrative structure, whereas a wiki can start out as a collection of somewhat fragmentary materials that isn't ready to be told start to finish.

If this was paper I'd say that the wiki for me has felt a lot more like note cards (terse, single topic, incomplete) and the blog is more like little essays that are informed by the note cards but that are narratives that stretch out across a half dozen or more topics in their course.

shroomie/joan

@j3s what does a personal wiki entail? when i think wiki i see a cold repository of information, perhaps the furthest you can get from a blog.

Rev. Block Me Coward

@j3s I have a personal wiki with hundreds of posts. It's fun!

monoxane

@j3s Wikis are absolutely the way to go, as you said it’s basically an extension of how the brain links and recalls information. It’s also so much easier to keep up to date as you and the content change throughout life.

Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle

@j3s not sure it helps but, instead of a publicly facing wiki, I use SimpleNote and am considering switching to Obsidian (so that the notes will rest locally in a human-readable format)

Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle

@j3s Obsidian and related extensive note-taking apps can publish your notes, but not sure about self-hosting or making it look like a website.

Hal

@j3s

I use a heavily patched gitit and it's really great. I have a workflow where I edit in a wiki but then pages are moved to my blog when they are ready to publish. Makes it easier to distinguish published and unpublished ideas that way

✨jes✨

@zzz i love that!! do u have a link to ur blog?

Hal

@j3s

Sure progressandclass.surge.sh

It's just a Hugo blog. This is the theme I use for the wiki which is for private use so would prefer not to link itself

github.com/t13a/gitit-bootstra

Hal

@j3s

The important thing is it's all markdown, so moving documents between the wiki and the blog is just copying files!

It's important to give the files the same names, but with relative paths it means even the internal links will stay intact when published!

jag (he/him)

@j3s i'm inspired i definitely struggle with blogging

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