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0 pointsgreggman35y ago0 comments

I ran my own personal wiki in like 2004 - 2008. I'm not sure too cumbersome is the word I'd use. I just never found it that useful.

Today though Google Docs, Keep, Notes, Github Gists, github itself, and many other places I can easily store notes and access from anywhere. No reason to setup a wiki and have to maintain it myself.

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hombre_fatal5y ago

For me, the problem after 10+ years is how disjointed all of the data becomes and how much data you generate across the web. I have stuff that means something to me scattered across every service and every account.

When you start to plan how to move all of your stuff under one umbrella, the solution starts to sound a lot more like a wiki on paper, I think. Even if you move all this stuff to your filesystem, I think you still need a layer over it to manager it all -- or at least I did.

Of course, it's not the only answer. And I admit I have been contributing to wikis like Wikipedia and UESP for a decade now and the jump to a personal wiki was a no brainer.

But I wonder, what solution would you consider for this "disjointed data" problem? Do you just not see it as a problem? One of the first things I did when I stood up a personal wiki was to log into ancient google accounts to exfiltrate ancient google docs that I'm glad I found again.

pdfernhout5y ago

I know what you mean. I've made comments over the years to Slashdot, Soylent News, HackerNews, Disqus, WordPress blogs, Wikis, various other special sites, and so on and would like to see that all together and be archived -- especially when sites disappear. It's sad that people made all these centralized web services (often to make money by getting between people and their data) and thus displaced a lot of email instead of people making email better. There is a lot to be said for a local email system like Thunderbird as a knowledge base that goes back for decades. That is true even if email tools could be better if they were more generalized or if they had easier ways to publish stuff from email to the web and ingest stuff from the web back into to the local system. Some related ideas by me from 2015 which I am still working towards on-and-off in my spare time: https://pdfernhout.net/thunderbirds-are-grow-manifesto.html

My latest experiment (in Mithril/HyperScript/Tachyons/Node.js) integrates a file browser, markdown viewer and editor, and email viewer (although it is all still very rough): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15

But ultimately what we probably need more than tools are simple and popular standards for encoding information that can be linked together. Email (in MIME format) is one such standard but it is fairly complex. Maybe a JSON schema or RDF schema for linked information might help with that. Or something like tags or RDF triples embedded in Markdown -- something I started playing with in Twirlip15 (inspired in part by Foam).

Code for a foam-like "Ideas" app using markdown, triple parsing, and Cytoscape: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/aa75ed1be5dc4a7...

And one example file: https://github.com/pdfernhout/Twirlip15/blob/792b067c30c7846...

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