2024-11-13 A big memex
======================

How big are your memories? Some days they seem endless. Perhaps you
started using an external add-on brain, a memory extender (memex) – a
blog, like I did. It's about 20 years old, now. The archives show the
first blog posts showed up in 2002. I think I copied some entries over
from Meatball, at the time. So I'm not entirely sure when this
particular site started.

Back then, I was big into wikis. I was a Meatball Wiki regular. The
history of blogs show that they entered the mainstream around 2004. I
thought they were for people who couldn't edit and couldn't
collaborate. The text is written and then sinks to the bottom to join
the forgotten posts of the past. Wiki pages, on the other hand, were
forever!

This site started as a wiki. And then something happened: I realized
that the things I wanted to write under one heading changed over time.
Sometimes I changed my mind. Sometimes I cared for a different aspect.
I realized that I couldn't go back to edit the old pages and just
replace the old words with the new words. I wanted to capture this
slow churn.

All of this came back to me when @somi@merveilles.town asked on fedi:

> for those that maintain personal wikis by hand, how do you approach
> it generally? Do you try and associate pages by topic? Do you
> maintain some sort of hierarchical table-of-contents? Maybe you tag
> stuff? Do you put it all in one big bag?

Now you know what happened. My site started as a wiki and has drifted
towards a blog.

How it works: The blog posts are wiki pages starting with an ISO date.
These pages are automatically added to the front page.

Pages have hashtags and if a page with that name exists (not all
hashtag pages exist) then a link from the hashtag page back to the
tagged blog post gets added automatically. The result is that every
hashtag page has a subset of my blog posts, gathering all the blog
posts for that particular topic.

If I write about a thing, I use hashtags. After a while I might think
that I've written so much about this topic, time to create a dedicated
page for this hashtag. I add a list of links to existing pages with
that tag and from now on pages with this hashtag get added
automatically.

Visitors (and I) can visit the hashtag page to see how my writing
about the topic has evolved (or not).

I think the big driver of this is that my memex is over twenty years
old and has thousands of pages. Going back to old pages to update them
does not works for me. 😧

Writing more about a topic, and linking old and new does work.

​#Wikis #Blogs #Oddmu ​#Blogs #Oddmu ​#Oddmu