The Daily Notes Dilemma

You see, I have a nice wiki , and for a couple of years, I have written a new entry in it (nearly) every day. These “daily notes” have been interspersed and interlinked with the rest of the wiki’s content. It works, but I don’t love it.

Writing in TiddlyWiki is fine. It’s super easy, but it’s also a little clunky, which quickly becomes friction. And the experience for visitors is weird if you’re not familiar with TiddlyWiki. Also, there’s no RSS feed. I sometimes consider this a feature, because it’s nice writing freely and knowing it’s not “going anywhere”. On the other hand, if I were someone wanting to follow along with me, I’d want a damn RSS feed.

So, I periodically waffle between writing my daily posts on the wiki and on a “real” blog. One thing that has kept me in the wiki is that I can easily link things from my daily notes posts to the more permanent entries. This helps build a network of links. I love the ideaof all this linking back and forth, but in practice, it’s not as useful as I’d hoped. TiddlyWiki works better when each distinct idea or thing is created as a separate “tiddler”. I’ll create a new tiddler about something, link to that something, and then transclude the tiddler in that day’s daily. And then I almost never actually take advantage of all that work. So why bother? I mean, it’s not as if I’m trying to build some sort of Zettlekasten here.

I love writing in Emacs and keeping everything formatted as Org-mode files . I like Hugofor blogging and I like the way the rendered site looks. TiddlyWiki is easier overall but Emacs/Org/Hugo is more fun for me and I believe it results in a nicer experience for visitors.

All that to say I’m once again back to using a “real” blog for my daily notes. I’ve committed enough to this that I’ve added a link in the navigation here. You can follow along at daily.baty.net .

An RSS feed for daily.baty.net is available both on its own and as part of my Everything Feed .