Personal Wiki

This is my personal wiki. Here, I collect any and all information that is useful or interesting to me, along with my own notes and thoughts. I hope it can be as useful to you as it is to me.

Philosophy

I think the internet is nowhere as interesting as it was a decade or more ago. I'm not saying the internet browsing experience was necessarily good then, I'm just saying it was more engaging. For instance, there's been a joke going around for a couple of years about how the (American) internet is just four websites, each with screenshots of the other three.

If you google anything, the top results are highly SEO'd and are designed to suck you in and keep you trapped. Forget the semantic web, even hyperlinks from one site to another are rare. It's getting hard to discover and be led down a path less traveled when there's so much money to be had to keep you browsing and consuming.

Making a personal wiki is making what I think the web should look like. I know it may be difficult to impossible to change the internet as a whole, but if I find it useful, it is a success. If friends and acquaintances use it and are inspired, then that is more than I could ask for.

Organization

I currently organize the wiki files using the Library of Congress catalog system. At first I put everything in one folder, but that quickly became hard to navigate as I tend to write short snippets about a wide variety of topics. I moved to a folder scheme, but it became hard to decide what the folders should be called: some articles could go into multiple folders and similar articles ended up in different places.

The LoC system isn't without its flaws (I disagree with some of the topic hierarchies), but it is good enough. I can easily find what I'm looking for and I don't need to spend time coming up with my own organization scheme.

(By the way, I consider this wiki itself to be general reference, which is why I filed this page under AG)

Authoring Tools

The main tool I use for writing is Obsidian MD. I write everything in Markdown. Obsidian is mainly useful to get a semi-WYSIWYG editor experience and to traverse links easily. Obsidian also handles YAML metadata well, which allows me to add data like tags and creation dates.

To publish the markdown files, I use a custom Python script to convert the markdown to HTML. I don't write raw HTML as I care more about the content than the formatting. I mainly write text and add the occasional link or image.

I use the Python Markdown library, but write multiple extensions for my needs.


Created . Updated .

Home > A General Works > AG General reference > Personal Wiki