Yak Shaving

Inspired by Maggie Appleton’s tweet this week, I’ve been thinking again about digital gardens.

Nerding hard on digital gardens, personal wikis, and experimental knowledge systems with @_jonesian today.

We have an epic collection going, check these out...

1. @tomcritchlow's Wikifolders: https://t.co/QnXw0vzbMG pic.twitter.com/9ri6g9hD93

— Maggie Appleton (@Mappletons) April 15, 2020

I love learning and I love learning in public (I’ve written about that elsewhere on this blog). I’ve read and thought a lot about that over the past 15 years, as an educator and a learner, and I’ve been thinking about how to make more concrete artifacts.

This has been a culmination of thinking, from Tom Critchlow talking about the difference between stock and flow in digital gardens, to Joel Hook and Amy Hoy’s thinking around this and swyx thinking about learning in public. Add that to the book I read over the Christmas holidays on How to take smart notes and Tiago Forte’s concept of intermediate packets and my brain just exploded.

The lock-down made me press pause on a lot of my thinking - my PTSD symptoms spiked and life became a bit harder but I seem to be getting a bit more on top of things now.

So, I want to build a wiki like Tom’s but probably with some kind of visual language like Buster’s. Ian pointed out that John Ortander did some work on this already here but that project hasn’t seen a lot of love recently.

As I begin to do this, I’ve done some yak-shaving. I’ve restructured blog content, moved week notes, moved the blog to use Tailwind and MDX and introduced a brief homepage. Knowing that I want this to be useful I thought I should actually produce some content while doing this.

I’m in a place now where I think I have a grasp of the moving parts, so hopefully the wiki section of this site will be up and running soon.