Maintaining a blog has certain disadvantages, mostly due to linearity of post timeline and its apparent permanence. I am making a switch to a wiki which provides much more freedom and makes the texts and corrections flow much more fluently.
Ever since I started this blog, every post has made me rethink the purpose of the whole blog. Sometimes I have been putting personal experiences, other times half baked opinions. A few times, I have pushed because there was nothing in here for a long time. Even more than these organizational issues, the idea of having a conclusion, with a timestamp, is something which keeps the blog from working along with me. Not that I have a pandora box to open, but I do have a bunch of perpetually partially complete pieces scattered around which don't fit in a blog.
A personal publishing system should work well with my workflow which is (usually) less driven by deadlines/checkpoints and more by explorations.
1. A personal wiki
After some scripting to try and improve the content generation pipeline for this blog recently, I realized that I probably am recreating everything org-mode already provides. Even more, I already have a bunch of org files sitting around.
So I am now moving to an org mode based personal wiki. Not very wiki like and
just a pile of files which lives at file:///pile 1. The pile is fundamentally a place to log things in the process of
gathering and playing around with knowledge of any kind. This makes it more of
an assistive tool for myself than anyone else. Using org mode helps a lot in
this selfish endeavor because of org-babel (for authoring code based pages) and
org-publish (for publishing the whole pile to the web). I will most probably
have a page documenting my setup once it reaches a decent level with enough
differences from other org-publish tutorials on the web.
Here are some of the items that I am thinking of putting up in my pile:
- Notes from readings.
- Problems I would like to know answers to and incremental solutions as I get time to work on those.
- Reading lists and other similar aggregations which are right now floating around in separate repositories.
- Some miscellaneous writings.
Some contents still belong in a blog post (and they will come out as and when needed), but many ideas are fundamentally evolving and they need a lot more than just a bunch of edits to tell a consistent story.