I thought it might be cool to make some sort of idea bin. It would keep all of my thoughts crosslinked. Sort of like a wiki, but more textfileish, and only for me. This was originally an idea I got when I read something on Misuba’s blog – where he pointed out that the only real difference between a personal wiki and a blog is that a blog presents data in a time ordered fashion, while a wiki has it via references.
More and more people are coming to the conclusion that we need a way for users to copy down their thoughts fast and easily. Personal wikis, emacsWiki, and an OSX tool called Quicksilver are all trying to solve this problem. Here I am, trying to solve the problem in my own way, for me.
I admit that I’m a non-standard user, but I might be a standard geek user, and geeks don’t want to edit text in their browsers.
We want vim.
No wait, we want emacs.
No, wait, we want to have long involved flamewars about which one is better.
So the backend to the idea bin is simply a directory of flat text files. Their filenames become the title of the page, and their contents get lightly interpreted. When people comment on the blog, their comments for filename go into a flat text file name filename.comment, which I can edit, again, with a text editor. This makes the idea bin perfect for me, but probably not perfect for others. Misuba points out (via Ourobouros) that this still doesn’t solve the drowning in data problem – there’s no good search method. But it solves a lot of problems for me – in particular, it’s quite helpful because I can just start typing in vim and then hit save and then run away. Since it’s hosted on my own server instead of being aggregated on livejournal, nobody has to read it if they don’t want to, and ideas are automagically interlinked via the simplest scheme possible.
Note that this is also the file you will get if you access a nonexistant idea.
I’ve moved to WordPress. There’s just too many advantages to using robust extensible systems built by other people, even if the language involved is PHP. I’m coding up the autolink plugin ASAP, and that should be the final thing standing between it having all the functionality of my idea bin and more besides.
