About this wiki

Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20

Summary

Welcome, welcome. Sit down. Take off your jacket. Sleep in my bed. I'll make you some hot coco and seven shots of vodka. After that we can have a nice long talk about all the things that I know about.

This wiki is basically my digital garden. If you don't know what a digital garden is, than good news! You can look it up yourself. That's the first rule of this wiki, it assumes prior knowledge on many things; if you find something you don't know about than it's your responsibility to find your own source and information.

I guess sometimes there will be direct sources, but for the most part it's up to you to find what you're looking for. Link rot is a plague, and I choose not to even expose myself to it unless there's a compelling reason.

In direct opposition to the blog, pages on the wiki will be continually updated as I think of things to change. You can think of the blog like a time capsule of non-fiction writing, while the wiki being a living breathing externalization of my horrible horrible brain.

To search this wiki, I honestly recommend that you download it and use external tools. If you can't do that, than you might be able to do a web search that looks something like: "search string site:www.timtimestim.com/wiki/", but I can't guarantee anything with that.

This thing is really really young right now. I'm still testing the waters, and shit might change in the future. Imagine that using the wiki right now is like using beta software: pointlessly annoying.

After some time I expect that this will become a huge compendium of knowledge, ideas, and bad jokes. Either that or it'll be abandoned. Who knows!

Why did I make this wiki?

I have a bit of a rule about my blog: don't change anything significant. When something is released on the blog, it's supposed to be like that until the stars burn out like suicidal candles. I do spelling and formatting fixes, but beyond that it's supposed to be "pure" (except for those instances where it wasn't. Some early posts have some larger edits, but they are clearly marked. I'm better about it now.)

This is great and all, but it was kind of restrictive. Stuff on the internet updates, and my opinions get more nuanced and refined as time goes on. I've begun to view the blog more as a place to put finished non-fiction writings, and less of a place to constantly update on things. So, naturally, I haven't added much to the blog.

I wanted this to change, so I tried to write more stuff. But a lot of it was really half-hazard and didn't really feel "worthy" (ha!) of the blog.

Eventually, I came across the idea of a personal wiki -- otherwise known as a "digital garden" by some nerds out there in the internet. I really liked the idea, so much so that I wanted to implement it into my own website. So now I have the excuse to go off on huge tangents that nobody cares about, go crazy deep into topics that are hyper specific and meandering, and I don't need to worry about keeping it "pure" either!

Another useful use of this useful wiki would be for back referencing. If I have a page about, say, the software I use, than I can easily link to it from elsewhere in my site (or even externally, if I can ever get the balls to). As the wiki grows, so does my ability to use it as the backbone of more complicated things I have planned.

Also, it's cool.

The structure of the wiki

Table of contents, followed by text. Pretty simple there.

The URLs are a bit interesting. Basically, everything on a wiki is usually densely interconnected, so having a weird folder hierarchy doesn't seem like a good idea. But if every wiki page is under the /w/ directory, than that makes it super easy to link to, especially if I keep the page names simple.

For example, consider the using page: www.timtimestim.com/w/using.html

You know the name of the site, you know it's in the wiki, and it's just a simple word -- "using". I can even use this page for more than just software; it's general enough for hardware and other pointless bullshit too!

I'm still in the experimentation phase with the structure right now. I think I might have to change plans as the wiki grows over time. Different data sizes require different ways to manage them.

One current idea is to have meta-indexes for a lot of related pages, once the size gets large enough; like having a "software" page that links to all the pages about software and provides summaries. This won't be for a long while, though, unless I end up writing way more than I thought I would in this thing.

How to use this wiki

The short answer is: however you want.

The long answer is...

Well, I don't really intend to make this to be something you use. It's just... A thing? I like to write a lot, and I like to have my writing on my website, because having a website is something I've wanted since I was a child. This wiki, at its darkest core, is an excuse to write more things. It's a conduit for expressing my opinions about topics that I don't actually have a very developed opinion on, and it's a safe haven for not really caring about writing quality all that much.

If you find something useful here, than great, it's exceeded my expectations wildly. But the one true goal here is just to write things for the sake of writing them. No grand schemes, no forced insanity and polish, just making my small little corner of the internet a little bit more fleshed out.

With that said, you can probably find more use in this wiki by downloading it. Maybe use unix tools like grep and shit, if that's your style. It's certainly my style, at least, so I get the privilege of projecting it onto you.

The index page is a good place to get general info about what's going on here. Since the wiki is so small right now, it doesn't really do much, but as it grows the index will become more important.

You can also use the site's atom feed to keep up to date about the changes to the wiki (and everything else on the site. No I'm not going to make a wiki-specific rss feed. I have better things to do than managing multiple feeds). I'm trying to think of a good way to not spam the feed with a bunch of "this page has been updated!" posts. Maybe something like a monthly newsletter that gives a summary of all the changes? I'll have to think on it.

Other than that, I got nothin' for you. Seek out your own salvation. Or use a wiki that's made to be useful to more than one person.