My personal wiki is now public
Today I’m making my personal wiki public: https://crlf.link/mem/
Since I started using Emacs in february this year, my main focus was organizing my personal notes. It was a big mess.
The entries were sorted by date mostly, but the title of each entry wasn’t in a single format, so it was hard (impossible) to find all of them.
The format of external links was different. The ideas and TODOs were all in different formats. And I had no internal links between the notes.
Anyway, I converted all of them from Markdown to Emacs Org and I tweaked them by hand. A large part.
I used search and replace with regexes where I could.
Then I started to create “permanent notes”.
I didn’t truly understand what permanent notes were, until I created a few of them.
All my journal entries are “fleeting notes”, because they mostly capture the moment, they just continue to grow without a bigger structure and without a connection between them.
Permanent notes are general concepts, or ideas that will be useful and relevant 10 years from now, just as much as they are now. They are not limited in time, they don’t really have an “expiry date”.
The very first page I created was “note-taking”, in april.
Almost a month later I created a few more pages and I started to understand how it works…
Today I have 118 permanent notes, 1040 titles in total, 7268 lines of text, 296 internal links between the pages and 1960 external links.
(if my little Python script calculates them correctly. And it does. Because I checked it)
I didn’t have much trouble exporting them from Org to … something like an ugly hybrid between Markdown and HTML, right now.
Some pages look ugly and broken (especially the cheatsheet pages), but I’ll fix them eventually.
I use org-publish to convert the memex folder to HTML, and a Python script to cleanup the HTML files and rename them to “.md”.
The hybrid Markdown files are picked up by 11ty.dev and that’s it, they look just like all the other blog posts.
I will continue to update the pages and sync the updated on the website from time to time.
I will move big blocks of text from one page to another, if some pages become too big.
I hope I won’t break the links, I will do my best to maintain them.
I am a hoarder. I collect a lot of links in the hope that I will use them someday.
This worked for me in the past, I believe it will continue to work in the future and even better now that I know EXACTLY where to go when I need them.
In the past I used to think WHEN or HOW I used a specific library for example, or grep all the logs to find it. It wasn’t very efficient, because I didn’t always remember the context and sometimes I discovered the link a few months later, when I didn’t need it anymore.
I used Wikipedia as a starting point and reference for a lot of my pages.
I don’t trust Wikipedia absolutely, I have seen pages with wrong information, but it should represent the views of the majority of the people. Presumably.
So that’s it, check my wiki if you want: https://crlf.link/mem/
