The background
Over my internet years (more than 8 now) I’ve always kept a online presence. It started as a personal webpage, and then evolved into a blog that had several incarnations. The last one Maelstrom of Ideas, Code and Politics was probably the most successful one, and the platform was not enough for that.
Being a programmer myself, I’ve never considered my personal page as a “production” website, but rather as a development sandbox where I would try the stuff I was learning. That’s the reason why the contents of the old blog weren’t imported to this wiki, and it will still be available at a different address (http://blog.alcidesfonseca.com) but inactive. (For geeks: I had a lot of issues with encodings and I converted textile to html before adding to the database, and I take a different approach in this wiki).
So, why a wiki?
I wasn’t completely happy with the blog format. Mainly because I wanted to post code snippets, and I wouldn’t be happy if they were considered blog posts. So I considered a personal wiki. But this is not really a wiki. First there is only one author, me, but that might change in the future. Second, I don’t keep track of all the versions of a page (But I backup the database into a SVN repository). And third, some of the pages are blog posts, but inside a wiki. This might be confusing at first, but some people call it bliki.
Cool, you invented some cool new concept!
Not really, blikis are not a new thing. They haven’t reached the mainstream yet. This idea was heavily based on Rui Carmo’s The Tao of Mac. That’s a bliki I really admire. Not only for the platform, but also for the content. I could use his bliki platform Yaki, but this website is running on a shared host and I like Django pretty much. Plus, I got to play with it the way I want!
So I guess you’ll stop blogging and start writing wiki pages…
Kind of… I’ll still write blog entries, but I’ll probably write some of them (like software reviews) as a wiki page. But you’ll get the most important ones in the RSS feed, so you won’t get little insignificant pages, and the ones that I put my efforts into will reach your RSS reader for sure!
I just hope I don’t regret this :)