I’ve been extending and improving my personal wiki for 1 year now and it has been one of the best things I’ve done. I found writing blog posts was too high friction and very often didn’t finish things because there is so much you can talk about in any given article. But a wiki is just a living document containing your notes and thoughts on things. I also use it as my public bookmark manager as I collect interesting to me links under each topic.
For my wiki, I render everything to the web first with GitBook. And I have a macro I run that automatically commits any changes I’ve made with Sublime Text on the mac and Ulysses on the phone so everything is super easy to edit and publish.
Does anyone else keep their own wiki here? Or you think a blog is enough for you?
I’ve been considering starting a personal wiki after reading The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral by Mike Caulfield a while back. His article has some great set up and philosophy about the wiki versus blog. I’ve been using my own website/blog as a commonplace book for quite a while now to collect everything from what I’m listening to to what I read and even what I’ve highlighted/annotated online. I’ve documented a lot of the pieces I use to create/customize it. (Not everything I write is public either.)
Ultimately, I think that either way, having a solid search functionality becomes important regardless of which direction one chooses.
I really like Mike Caulfield’s Wikity theme. I reflected upon my experience here. I decided though to incorporate it into my ‘Collect’ site. My only point of confusion about the blog versus wiki is that Wikity is in fact built around ‘posts’ and WordPress.
I built my own WikiLog engine. It’s my 3rd generation, I’ve carried forward all my pages since starting 17yrs ago….