Tags:tech,meta
This site is set up like a personal wiki. It used to be a blog. There's still a blog section, but I'm trying to use it less. Why is that?
I have a few main issues with the blog as a medium for communication. The main one is that with a blog I felt like I was unproductive. Everything I wrote for my blog felt like it needed to be a standalone article, with an introduction, well-made points, and a conclusion. This is a good format for essays, but for just getting thoughts out there for a project or something I wanted to share, it sucked. I would want to talk about one thing, and end up writing 4 or 5 more things just to justify that one thing having a post about it.
The other main problem I had with blogging was that blog posts are inherently linked to the time they're written. This makes sense for some things, like news and events. But most stuff isn't like that. A project doesn't exist as a thing in time, it exists as a project. Changes to it exist as things in time, but the project itself isn't like that.
Similarly, information for the most part isn't temporal in the same way.
This fixed-ness in time also lead to a fear about posting incorrectly. Once a post is there, it is a post. It was made, it has a date, it will now not change (and if it does, there should be notice that it has changed and what has changed). The purpose of this website's structure (the tag-focused personal wiki) is that it allows for a lot of evolution. I was always unhappy with making blog posts I later wasn't happy with, and in this format those pages are free to be edited and fixed any time it is relevent.