by j3s on 1/2/25, 3:32 AM with 126 comments
by jefftk on 1/2/25, 2:55 PM
* 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.
by 1dom on 1/2/25, 9:45 AM
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".
by rpcope1 on 1/2/25, 4:10 AM
by INTPenis on 1/2/25, 9:33 AM
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.
by arjie on 1/2/25, 9:02 AM
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.
by internetter on 1/2/25, 4:06 AM
by OuterVale on 1/2/25, 8:46 AM
> 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.
by fractalcounty on 1/2/25, 9:42 AM
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.
by gritzko on 1/2/25, 7:50 AM
As a result, my project is effectively also a wiki:
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.
by xenodium on 1/2/25, 5:04 AM
Just launched https://lmno.lol blogging platform (no tracking or ads here). Read blogs from anywhere. No JS required.
by shortrounddev2 on 1/2/25, 5:35 AM
by WaitWaitWha on 1/2/25, 5:46 AM
Any ideas?
by kmfrk on 1/2/25, 2:57 PM
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.
by scoofy on 1/2/25, 9:24 PM
It was a covid project of mine, and it's growing even if many people don't know that it exists.
by Shank on 1/2/25, 7:13 AM
by altairprime on 1/2/25, 4:26 AM
by kqr on 1/2/25, 10:06 AM
by j3s on 1/2/25, 5:01 AM
by nmz on 1/2/25, 6:48 AM
by topato on 1/2/25, 5:41 AM
by mro_name on 1/2/25, 10:25 AM
Rotting produces compost, fertiliser. And at the same time makes way for new things. Great, isn't it?
by anthk on 1/2/25, 4:57 PM
Also, there are tons of small blogs out there.
by openrisk on 1/2/25, 10:58 AM
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...
by emodendroket on 1/2/25, 5:44 AM
by pixelmonkey on 1/2/25, 11:29 AM
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/
by aaron695 on 1/2/25, 4:44 AM
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.