This Is a Blog

This is a blog.

After reading that, you may be thinking “Omg, he’s hit his head and now he’s reduced to touching everything he sees and saying its name out loud”, but here’s what I’m getting at: it’s not a wiki or a digital garden or a set of links for future reference. All of those things are useful, and they’re all things I’m considering as additions to this site. I’m just not sure yet what combination of these I’ll wind up with.

Wikipedia seems to define a personal wiki as something on a local computer or USB stick, to be carried around.¹ But I reject their reality and substitute my own. There are many online personal wikis that are done very well and provide utility to both the site owner and anyone else who wanders into them. At some point, the line between personal and public wiki could get debatable, but it’s pretty easy to categorize a wiki made by an individual, for primarily that individual and anyone else who might care, containing information of interest to that specific individual, as a personal wiki.

I first started thinking about an online personal wiki when I was into Eleventy, and I came across Robb Knight’s personal wiki built in Eleventy and made public on GitHub. I was planning on taking his code and modifying it to suit my needs. But then more pressing projects happened, and then I started getting into Astro, and the Eleventy wiki never happened. However, I like the idea because I do want an always accessible categorized set of links I can rely on, and I like the wiki idea as a container for those links. Links + context, in other words. The result is that now I’m going to need to make my own in Astro, and if you think that sounds like a complaint, you don’t realize how much fun I’m having working with Astro. 😂

The Digital Garden concept is a little harder for me to decide what I want to do with. Digital gardens seem to be more like blogs than wikis in terms of post style, but more like wikis in terms of linking to concepts or being categorized in a certain way. It’s very nebulous. Also it seems like digital gardens are more about reading experience and less about finding information quickly or efficiently. I’ve never seen a digital garden yet where I could find what I thought was the root of a topic or category and dig into it. It’s more like wandering around finding things randomly, which doesn’t really meet my needs for linking to things in an organized manner nor for blogging things that are semi-easy to follow as a narrative.

And let’s be honest, there are only so many hours in the day and I already have put off making a wiki for months, at least. So I think right now I’ll pursue a strategy of making a personal wiki site subdomain as well as slowly adding in some of my posts from the previous incarnation of the blog to this one.

What say ye, dear reader?