Digital Gardening and Personal Wikis

27 Aug 2022

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2 min. read

Recently, I’ve been looking into starting a personal wiki. A place where I can store notes and guides for future reference. This way I:

  1. Always have access to my notes
  2. Reduce the risk of losing knowledge (use it or lose it)
  3. Allow other people access so they can hopefully find some valuable information

For me, half the battle is collecting information from a variety of resources (books, websites, videos, etc). But when it’s been a while since I’ve looked into a certain subject, I have to go digging through all those resources again (many times trying to re-create search-engine queries). A personal wiki allows me to write notes and link to other great resources on a topic.

I started by looking at self-hosted wikis (there are a lot of them), but I wanted something simpler. I don’t want a wiki that requires javascript, nor do I want a wiki that requires a database (or GitHub as a file server bleh). Those solutions are over-engineered for what I need. I just want a way to store markdown notes as a webpage for future reference.

This site is built using Hugo which builds markdown into html pages with a plethora of nice to have features built-in. Well, after a little hacking around this morning, I was able to develop some shortcodes and partials that will accomplish what I need in a personal wiki.

So with that, I’m announcing my digital garden, which can be found on the seedling icon on my home page. It will probably be pretty sparse for the next couple weeks, but I plan on moving some notes to it soon.

If you want to read more about digital gardening, I found these fun resources: