I have blogged for, what is it now? Probably two years and a half years of mostly stream of thought writing with an ultra simple text editor I built with René Galindo called Blank Page. It was not our intention to make a “simple editor”, but that is how the project started and we both enjoyed writing on it, so we’ve kept it clutter free. Now I refuse to write longish format anywhere else.

I noticed that the tool you use shapes your thinking. Even those damn underlines distract you from what is truly important: that you express what your mind is thinking. When you write for yourself in your notebook, you are not concerned with your handwriting, it is not meant for anyone but yourself, and this is also the approach I want to take with this notebook. Everything is written in Blank Page with spellcheck disabled, stream of thought with light editing, so that I allow to express myself with more freedom.

I also wish to reclaim all the content that I’ve left scattered in abandoned blogs and social media presences, it seems this place is perfect for that. We want to abandon social media yet we must find alternate ways of archiving and organizing our life. Are you really going to leave that to facebook? And I must add that I do not find that unappealing, delegating your dating, your social circle, your shopping, and having all your media archived by using their platform is such a good proposition that most of the world has decided to take it, but many have already realized this is a trap.

But I must also be honest with myself, and say that I have had this intention before, but I did not act on my intentions because I knew the piece of software I was using (Moveable Type) was a dead end, and I had to switch to something else.

I observed two directions: one of utter simplicity, most probably using a static blog generator, and outputting my words into the void, and the other was of utter complexity, trying to link and organize all the bits that come out of daily writing.

The first direction offered the possibility of infinite customization, but not on the authorship part. I could express ideas as standalone interactive pieces, but I know from experience this to be a lofty idea. This is why I installed Movable Type in the first place, I knew it inside out so I could do what I wanted, but I discovered I simply wanted to write. I was already programming enough as it was.

So I thought it better to use a wiki software, but a long time ago I had to make a theme for mediawiki and I saw how overly complicated it was to customize a theme, and I was not looking forward to that task. Instead, I stumbled upon wiki.js. It looked sleek. Surely I could just change a couple of things, how complicated could it be?

I spun up a Digital Ocean instance with their image and sure enough, I was up and running in five minutes. Amazing! Now, what do I need to do to customize it? Oh, there’s no themeing support yet, you have to and dive into their vue codebase and build it from scratch. Fair enough. I could use it as it is. Now, let’s write our first entry.. How to I automatically link an existing page? Oh crap, this is not a wiki!