iteratively tending to your digital garden

cf wiki gardening; Notice Patterns And Garden Your Private Wiki Notebook

some random thoughts on friction and intent

I was on a FedWiki call recently when Ward Cunningham asked my thoughts on page-renaming. I said I had considered some options for building code for it, but eventually dropped them. The scenario I was interested in supporting was accelerating my pipeline from Instapaper to my outer garden. Right now I do some manual processing on my laptop on highlights I pull down from Instapaper before running a script to push them to my garden. That includes changing the body and changing the title. So I was thinking that with good renaming, I could instantly post online, then revisit later.

But then I realized, that the "revisit" gap would still be there, and in between I'd have a lot of gunk in my garden.

Reviewing a piece, adding appropriate wikilinks to integrate it into my shared language, are similar to a Progressive Summarization process.

This also relates (in my head, at least) to why Tags are not nearly as helpful as wikilink/backlinking. (See old WikiWord As Tag.)

Tags, being relatively fixed, are an affordance for convergence (pulling together pages around a given anchor). But wiki/backlinking also supports divergence: I can play with different frames, then keep/reject/leave-fallow over time as I find them varyingly useful.

As an example, what was originally a Diet and Exercise page begat: Good Diet, Exercise, Physical Fitness, Bright-Eyed And Bushy-Tailed, Snack Food, Junk Food, Things I Like To Eat Ordered By Weight Watchers Points.....

Similarly: Python → Python Web Programming → Python Web Framework → Zope, Pyramid, Django, Flask → Django For Simplest Thing, Pyramid For Simplest Thing, Webpy For Simplest Thing → Flask For Wiki Engine....

And, of course, the Meaningful Life Roadmap links to a bunch of different glosses....

Each of those spin-off pages might start as a stand-alone, but end up with other notes attached to them... so then I might be at fresh-note → recent anchor page → other related anchor pages → other related notes.