home ‣ Knowledge base launched
There's a new section on my website: knowledge base .The idea is to collect small snippets of technical information that I might need in the future.
I'm doing this because I've been re-doing the same thing or trying to find the same information way too many times (e.g. every time I do a fresh install of Emacs I have to re-do some basic customization). This is a central place for me to look for stuff that I have figured out in the past. And if someone else finds them useful - all the better.
Each snippet is written to be concise, give information without rambling (so often seen on weblogs).
The html pages are generated from a single text file by a 500-line python script, articles are tagged. Entries are written in markdown markup (although the code also support textile - I haven't yet decided which one would be better for that sort of writing).
I could have used a blog or a wiki for that so why didn't I?
There are few reasons:
- I don't think those belong to a blog. This is a very specific kind of information, a mini-article, a receipt of sorts. Blogs are for commentary.
- my experiences with posting code snippets to wordpress are not good
- my experiences with posting anything through a web interface are not good
I now that last two points could probably be solved by installing more/better software, but I probably won't, so they are real for me now.
I just started and I'm already curious how it will look a year from now. If things go well, this knowledge base will grow to be a really useful resource. On the other hand maintaining it will require some effort so it might just as well die. I've seen dead wikis and dead knowledge bases before. Only time will tell.
If I manage to keep my knowledge base update, I should add RSS feed and add syntax coloring to code snippets.