As both a reader and a writer I disagree:

* A blog post is a snapshot: what did the author think at the time they wrote the post? If they change their mind or learn more, they write a new post and link forward and backwards. I know how to write for this environment (write what I think now, try to write things I'll feel glad to have written later) and how to work with things other people have written (consider the date, it's just one person's view).

* A wiki page is unclear. When should it be updated? How much should I trust that it was up-to-date as of the last-updated date vs that just being when someone fixed a typo? A few wikis and sites with wiki-like approaches (Wikipedia, gwern.net) manage to handle this well, but I think it's generally much more difficult and rot-prone.

I like the sentiment of this, I feel it very strongly. But I also think this is just another expression of personal website anxiety. This is the same sentiment that lead to the boom in digital gardens, notion, PKM etc.

I haven't accepted it yet, but I think people who host their own personal websites need to accept that they're hosting a personal website, and it's going to change over time as they change. People already know and accept and see that as a feature of a personal website. It's necessary as the tech changes too, a personal website with the latest and greatest tech from 20 years ago renders like garbage in a modern browser.

I really don't mean to sound mean, and I do sincerely empathise and sympathise with the author, because every year or 2, I have the same revelation that my website hasn't been updated in a while, and it's not my fault, it my platform just isn't technically correct and it's too restrictive and _that's_ what's stopping me being consistent on my personal website. But let's be honest, that's a me problem for not updating it or adding to it.

Every year or 2 for the past 20 years, I'm sure many of us could write the same "<my current website structure> rots. <The one I had an epiphany about a few days ago> wait".

Wikis are great, but it feels like outside of Wikipedia they've been dying. I wish bashhackers was still with us, and regret even more that there's not other large old school wikis for things like systems software development or other programming languages (or even a newer take on the original WikiWikiWeb). I guess maybe some of it is GitHub pages or that weird GitHub wiki thing now, but they don't really feel the same.

That's complete rubbish. Information rots, whether it sits in a blog or a wiki doesn't matter. A blog can be updated, can show its last updated date, just as a wiki does.

The statement hits home with me because over the past 20 years I have actually gone back and forth between having a wiki as a personal website and now finally back at blog again.

I find that markdown + tags is the best way to organize my personal knowledge base that I call a blog. My attempts at using Wikis always felt overkill.

I’m sure it will come to bite me in the ass one day but my personal site is a wiki written in the style of website that I’d write as a teenager: random updates about things and my life without any overlying theme or brand. I just write what I think, sticking my Blog entries under the Blog category and posting things haphazardly otherwise.

Other things I do that one doesn’t these days but you’d be eager to do in the past is that I’m public about my life. Funnily enough, it was someone else’s comment about Wikipedia deleting their article (which I did manage to recover) that pointed me to a Japanese mathematician. His website filled me with such nostalgia. There were all these stories of his life and things like that.

We used to put things like that on the Internet. The one thing I did miss back then was the ability to make small updates to people’s websites to fix typos and so on. So my website is a wiki (it’s just Mediawiki).

It’s been vandalized before by bots but I make nightly backups to R2 so I just dump and restart if things get ugly. Otherwise, it’s been fine.

One thing that might be fun is if someone one day happens upon my site and feels that sensation of looking at someone’s lived life.

I quite like the "Wiki" on my site. It's half blog, half wiki. The entries can be dated. They are presented chronologically. Navigation metadata is assigned to each entry. But not every entry appears on the blog feed. I can link between entries like [[link]]. Each entry tracks the links to and from it. The best of both worlds I think ^^

Perhaps the greatest contributor to the philosophy behind my own site is taken from the website of Wendy Carlos. Her site houses a page describing how her website ‘lives’: [1]

> I’m happy to report that this page (like most housework) will never be finished. It is a living document that grows and matures, just like most of real life. It is not a “work in progress”, for this would imply not much intrinsic value until that magic day it is completed.

> A novel is a work of art that, once completed may continue to exist forever in that finished state. An encyclopedia must be published at regular intervals to reflect new information gathered since the day it was published. Periodicals are timely only when first printed, then fall behind the times – get the latest issue to keep up. The technology behind web documents allows us to update information as often as is necessary. In this context, publishing dates become an outdated concept.

> While it is possible to “finish” a web document, the fixed information becomes stagnant, thus abolishing any desire for a return visit. This is something I call a cob-web page.

[1]: https://www.wendycarlos.com/live.html

Lovely poem, but I don't 100% agree with the idea that the wiki possesses some kind of ethereal, spiritual advantage over the blog. The post-SEO internet has been unkind to all forms of online writing, and the wiki has been an equally effective vessel for the proliferation of rot as any other (looking at you, Fandom).

From a practical perspective: Blogs may rot, but wikis decay. Larger projects with established community manpower may not struggle with offsetting the maintenance and complexity that traditional wikis demand. For personal writing, however, the burden of preventing decay falls entirely on the author- and it's not a trivial burden. Like others have mentioned, there seems to be an absence of great wiki software offerings that do a great job of mitigating said burden. The few I have tried introduced an inherent complexity and maintenance overhead that significantly detracted from the core activity of writing.

Regardless, I'm hoping that it's just an engineering problem that has yet to be solved instead of an unavoidable characteristic of the medium itself. I would love for the wiki to make a big comeback.

Within my current project, I use a special C dialect. So, I have to write a lot of explanatory text for those who dare to use it. And even in solo projects, I have been in situations when I had to check my own docs to understand what's going on.

As a result, my project is effectively also a wiki:

https://replicated.wiki/abc/

https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/abc

The idea is to put motivational and explanatory text into the parallel wiki, while all the API docs stay in the code the normal way. These are seriously different things.

The next step to unit tests all the code docs. Or, the other way around, to document tests to make them joy to read. That is the only way to solve doc rot.

Overall, I am trying to get as close to Literate programming as practically possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

Because code is hypertext, IDE is a browser.

Doing my bit to bring pre-seo-driven, or just genuine blogging to the foreground.

Just launched https://lmno.lol blogging platform (no tracking or ads here). Read blogs from anywhere. No JS required.

Any time I discover some new piece of coding information, or solve an obscure bug for which there is not a lot of common documentation, I write about it in my personal mediawiki server. Maybe some day when it has more content I'll host it publicly, but for now I find it more useful than a blog or a personal journal

Although I am not fond of the fixed flow of blogs, I have yet to find a "wiki" or similar mind-map-like tool that allows me to write better interconnected, non-linear writing that also works with a static site.

Any ideas?

Static blogs and dynamic blogs are also leagues apart given how much less is susceptible to rot.

GitHub.io blogs feel like something that came and went, but maybe the SEO wasn't there enough for people to stick with it.

The resurgence of newsletters is also another revitalization of blogs with better syndication (e-mail over RSS).

Probably not a great time to operate a WordPress blog though.

If you play golf and like wikis, please do me a solid and add your course (no matter how small) to https://golfcourse.wiki

It was a covid project of mine, and it's growing even if many people don't know that it exists.

I really love the idea of keeping a wiki, but for the same reasons j3s self-hosts a single binary for the blog, none of the wiki software that exists is particularly appealing to host and it sounds like a relatively large amount of work to build something like this from scratch.

Note that the usage of “blog” in this poem has nothing to do with livejournals and pre-spam personal journal blogs in general; it’s referring to the post-indexing apocalypse brought on by SEO and Google reacting to ‘freshness’.

Counterpoint: I subscribe to many blog RSS feeds because the content comes in a useful format and appropriate cadence. I have never subscribed to a wiki to get regular updates for it.

ironically i posted this on my blog 3:

A blog is personal a wiki is not.

Oh GOD! PLEASE don't kill vore.website!!! I very much appreciate that service! <3

frankly I find rot quite appealing.

Rotting produces compost, fertiliser. And at the same time makes way for new things. Great, isn't it?

Gopher holes and Gemini capsules don't.

Also, there are tons of small blogs out there.

After the history-making success of wikipedia the wiki movement has unfortunately stagnated. Wikinomics [1] is yet another early vision of the digital society that did not come to pass.

The reasons as always quite complex: from the general decline of the public internet due to centralization / enshittification (and now wholesale appropriation), to poor technology choices and missing value propositions that could induce the next wave of adoption and development.

Yet there is still no tangibly better alternative vision for open source knowledge management, especially if of the collaborative kind.

One interesting direction - yet after more than a decade still largely in embryonic phase as far as broad adoption - is wikibase [2]. It runs as an extension of mediawiki and makes it relatively painless to integrate structured data in a semantic web style (e.g. [3] for an example of integrating veris [4] data).

Its not clear if the wiki era is permanently dead or it just waits for some rain to blossom again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibase

[3] https://www.openriskmanual.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/It...

[4] https://github.com/vz-risk/veris

I don't know what the heck that means (clicking on the article didn't illuminate it for me, sorry) but Wikis that their maintainers have lost interest in become overrun by spam pretty quickly and if they just disable edits instead it's not any more useful than a blog (arguably worse since a blog post is at least intended to be tied to a specific moment in time while Wiki articles are meant to be eternally current).

Obligatory meme:

https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/19/

I'm personally in the top left corner and bottom right corner at the same time, which is sort of funny.

I have used WordPress since 2004-2005, and I've also written a Python static site generator before using Flask + Frozen-Flask[1]. I've also made stops through tools like Sphinx, Hugo, Gatsby, and VitePress[2]. But my personal site continues to run WordPress[3].

I think I'd prefer something like VitePress these days for a technical documentation site. It has a lot going for it for that use case. And it feels built to last.

On true wikis that one can self-host, I recently learned that MediaWiki with a reasonable theme like Citizen[4] is a nice choice for an open source powered private wiki. Although I do find the Mediawiki markup language a little cumbersome versus simpler markup languages like reST or Markdown/MyST in the Python community (or GitHub-Flavored Markdown or Asciidoc supported elsewhere). But Mediawiki has a lot of nice features -- after all, Mediawiki powers Wikipedia. The theme makes it work properly on mobile, adds a little more structure for automatic ToC, and makes content editing a bit simpler.

It still isn't nearly as polished as commercial wiki-like software (e.g. Notion) but it's better than open source wikis used to be.

On the subject of the blog post, I think bit-rot or info-rot is the natural order of things. The kind of software you run isn't going to change those facts. And if you're curating knowledge about technical computing subjects (that isn't about durable topics like, say, C and Linux system calls), you should expect exponential decay.

I do find it kind of amusing how many tools and frameworks developers have created for making it easier to edit HTML pages, though. Truly a foundational 21st century problem that deserves a technical solution that can last for decades without itself bit-rotting.

[1]: https://frozen-flask.readthedocs.io/

[2]: https://vitepress.dev/

[3]: https://amontalenti.com/archive

[4]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Citizen

Great poetry.

It's timely that Oxford 'academics' have no idea what 'brain rot' means but Urban Dictionary (A wiki) gets it right.

https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Brainrot

Most Wikis don't work, it'd be interesting to work out what it takes. Starting list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis

Encyclopedia Dramatica (NSFW) is better than Conservapedia for instance.