Thoughts
Thinking about how to re-organize my website.
There are a couple of approaches here:
* A blog, doesn't need explaining. I want to highlight that it is fundamentally chronological.
* A book, describing me or the things I've done or whatever. Rather than a log with distinct entries, this format is conceptually a single document (even if it's split across multiple pages or chapters), intended to be read start to finish.
* A dictionary of opinions. The idea here is that for any topic, I can write ~500 words describing what it is, or my views on it. So I could create a "dictionary" where each entry is a topic that links to my post about it. It wouldn't be chronological, like a blog, and someone reading it could jump directly to a topic that they're interested it. It would be a collection of individual documents that could stand alone, unlike option 2 (which views the entire site as a single document).
What I really don't want to do is create a personal knowledge base, or a personal wiki. And my concern is that that's basically what I described in #3.
There are a couple of reasons I don't want to create a personal knowledge base. Mainly, I think that it purports to contain a representation of the things that I know. And I think it does a bad job at that, because my mind and even my knowledge is a lot more fluid and fuzzy than can be expressed in a collection of pages. Similarly, since I can't transcribe literally everything in my head, I'm afraid it would end up being wide but shallow. It wouldn't be better source for any topic than a primary source, and it wouldn't be good representation of my mind.
The difference between a PKB and the ideal dictionary of opinions that I tried to describe above, is that in the latter I'm giving you "an opinion on X," not "what do I know about X" or "what is my conception of X." The latter 2 questions are very hard to answer with words.
My last problem with a PKB is that it purports that my thoughts or my conception of a thing doesn't change if I'm not thinking about it. That's kind of a weird argument to make, and it's not fixed by other options. But just because I thought something once, doesn't mean I can't change as a person and hold a different view in the future. What this means is that every entry in a PKB is inherently ephemeral, even if I don't revisit the topic. Like if I wrote a post about Khan Academy a couple of years ago, it would be very different in some ways from if I wrote one today. But I'm not going to write one today, because KA isn't something that I think about that much anymore. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, aside from the obvious ones of dating everything and/or auto-removing things past a certain date. Neither of which seem very in the spirit of a PKB.
What I'm leaning towards is a listing of ~10 projects on the projects page where I can describe cool work that I've done, and ~10 opinions on an Opinions or Views page where I can post a small number of active "blog posts." But once I add a new one, old ones would get rotated out of the listing, archived, and hidden. And then I can also set up an RSS feed for changes to that page if I want to.
By inherently limiting scope, it would let me make sure that the active pages are up-to-date, and also avoid the illusion of attempting to wholly describe me as a person.
If I didn't have this page, I would be in favor of writing couple-sentence blog posts, as is common in Geminispace. But if I'm going to write something for matthiasportzel.com I want it to be higher quality, and if it's going to be higher quality, I don't want it to go out of date (where at all possible).