One Dimension

One dimension is an experimental writing[1] system that links thoughts together through bi-directional links. You might call it a kind of digital garden[2].

The goal of this system is to explore the creation of a recorded and constantly evolving body of reflection and synthesis. I don’t know if this will be the best medium for it, but it seems like a decent first step.

I’ve elected to make One Dimension publicly viewable[3]. There’s something important about putting these thoughts into a form that’s readable, even if it’s never actually read. A symbolic gesture for myself. That said, the quality is likely to be variable. I’ll probably write a lot of contradicting[4] things here. Things I eventually disagree with, changes in thinking. It’s my hope that growth[5] can be better recorded through a system like this.

I originally built One Dimension as part of a larger yearlong endeavor to create a series of small websites[6]. This project is a bit of a mash up of different systems I find inspiring, primarily Xanadu[7], Wikipedia[8] and Gwern.net[9].

What's here

There are two main categories of thoughts here:

1. Perennial thoughts. These are thoughts that I come back to over time and link together. There's no index of these; the only way to read is to traverse through the forward and backlinks. They often are initiated through daily pages, or I'll write things that come to mind into a little notebook[10] that I go through each evening.

2. Experiments[11]. These are more experiential, interactive explorations of a particular topic.

3. ~~Daily pages. I write one page on my typewriter[12] per day, and these pages are saved here. They don't contain any links and aren't ever revisited. They're super rough and full of typos, run on sentences, repetition, and all sorts of other technical mistakes. The main goal is to get ideas onto a page and see where it takes me. I never can predict what results.~~ I stopped adding daily pages to this site in May 2022.

How it’s built

One Dimension is a folder of markdown files on my desktop. I built a series of tools to interact with those files and save and edit them from my browser. The online version of the site is generated as a bunch of static files and served from AWS S3 object storage behind Cloudflare’s CDN. The source code for all of these tools can be found in the project’s repository[13].

Some related thoughts: