Author: Neil Mather

Quick followup to yesterday’s article about my wiki graph.

As I mentioned there, I’m not (yet) convinced of their utility as sensemaking aids, and the one I have certainly needs refinement.

Despite that, after playing around for a day, it has had some other benefits.

Firstly, soon after I published it, Panda emailed me with a note that he had seen both Jane Jacobs and the Paris Commune on my graph, highlighting a shared interest in these. He shared two great resources with me off the back of that.

Second, by browsing around it I’ve discovered things I’d forgotten were in there (and its only 6 months old…). This is perhaps an another angle to the ‘on this day’ feature various sites and individuals use, where you get reminded of things you posted about in the past.

Third, like I said, I noticed a few orphan pages, as well as pages that I knew now should link to something else, I just hadn’t done so when I first wrote it.

So I would say the graph so far appears to have potential as a discovery aid, for myself and maybe for others too, as well as a good gardening aid.

Ton made a post recently about federated bookshelves, sparked by a post from Tom. It’s an idea that Gregor has done a good bit of thinking about from an IndieWeb perspective.

Book recommendations is something I’m always interested in. At base, all it needs is a feed you can follow just of what people have been reading. I’ve set up a channel in my social reader called ‘Good Reads’, and subscribed to Ton’s list of books, as the sci-fi focus looks right up my street. If anyone else has a feed of read books, let me know!

I am keeping my own list of books I’ve read in my wiki – sadly not marked up in any useful way at present – something for me to do there.

A recent discovery for me near my new home town is The Cragg – a mini-peak nestled in the outskirts of the Forest of Bowland.

It’s a short (hilly!) bike ride from my home in Lancaster.

Right now, the journey there has a lot of lapwings in the fields, with their distinctive calls, and fields full of sheep, lambs, and cows.

From The Cragg you get a close up view over towards a small hilltop windfarm of seven turbines. I love to watch them.

And it has absolutely stunning vistas – you can see the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, and Morecambe Bay. You’re accompanied pretty much all of the way by Clougha Pike.

I feel very lucky to have it so close by, especially right now.

Thinking about ‘bliki‘ (blog and wiki, garden and stream, stock and flow, etc etc) tooling a bit.

[Aside: perhaps if I made some bliki software, I would call it ‘Flock’.. flow and stock…]

Really interesting to learn (via Desmond) that Martin Fowler has a post about the link between blogs and wikis, from 2003(!).

Beyond the name, however, there’s the very ephemeral nature of blog postings. Short bursts of writing that might be interesting when they are read – but quickly age. I find writing too hard to want to spend it on things that disappear.

“I find writing too hard to want to spend it on things that disappear” – I love that as a little epigram for why you might want a digital garden.

Martin calls the blog and wiki combo his bliki.

Like a blog, it allows me to post short thoughts when I have them. Like a wiki it will build up a body of cross-linked pieces that I hope will still be interesting in a year’s time.

As a word, I’m not so keen on ‘bliki’ (although back then Martin didn’t like the word ‘blog’, and well here we are now, I don’t give it a second thought).

But blikis as a concept – I’m all in.

Tinkered around with my org-publish steps a little bit – moving the config out of my .spacemacs file and into a dedicated publish.el in my wiki project, along with a Makefile to run it as a –batch process.

This way, it can be better shared with others, and I can also run it in the background – org-publish is pretty slow sadly, and blocks all of Emacs when you run it interactively.

This also takes me in the direction of having the publish step actually happen as a post-receive hook on a git remote somewhere, if I wanted to do that.

It was a bit of a faff, but I learned a bit more about Emacs and org-publish in the process, and had to do some basic elisp debugging to figure out why the org-roam backlinks stuff wasn’t working. Pleased to have learned some new things!