Adam Engelhart

Personal Wikis: the Modern Commonplace

I’ve kept many notebooks in my life, but I’ve never collected them all in one place–I’ve generally scribbled whatever I was thinking about on whatever piece of paper was handy (yes, the backs of many envelopes have been so abused). However, I’ve recently started implementing a solution to make all the things I’d written on paper available in a digital format.

I have established a personal Wiki, which I think is the modern equivalent of the commonplace book. I now have a place to put all the things I think about when I’m not thinking about other things, which seems like a rather stupid thing to say once I’ve written it, but it made sense when I thought it. I suppose that would be better put in my personal Wiki . . .

In any event, I keep it using TiddlyWiki, which has the advantage of being contained in a single HTML file and having a very simple installation procedure:

1. Download the HTML file.
2. Open it.
3. There is no step 3.
4. Nor 4.
5. Nope! You’re done!

1 comment December 5th, 2008

Various Technical Changes

I’ve tweaked a few things around here! The first, and most prominent, is that I’ve edited the WordPress theme I’m using (Blix) to make it wider, which means it won’t cut off the 500-pixel wide images I get from Flickr. Hooray for randomly hax0ring CSS until things work right. Email me if you want the edits.
The second is that I’ve added the Sociable plugin, so you can add my posts to Digg and the like. I’m probably going to dump a few of the services soon; twenty tiny icons at the bottom of every post is a bit much.

Finally, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4, which will have absolutely no visible effect on anything, but y’know, new software. Whee!

The width thing is the most important upgrade. When I made my first soap post, I noticed the image extended into the sidebar and looked pretty nasty, so I wanted to fix that before I continued.

Let me know if any of these edits make the site ugly for you. Soap soon.

1 comment August 16th, 2006