A new year, a new blog January 4
I was finally convinced to start blogging again, by Chris. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and as he put it, a good New Years resolution. I think it partly ties back into the procrastination I feel with closing out my trip (scanning slides, writing friends I met travelling, polishing up my travel blog). But it’s good to finally break out of it. I realized tonight that the web design part of it was holding me back, so I’ve decided to skip doing a design for now, and just throw it up bare.
In other news, I’ve been playing around with wikis a lot lately. I’m running php wiki for keep notes to myself, todo lists, and most importantly, client server documentation. I don’t think it’s possible to truely appreciate the power of a wiki until you start actually trying to do work with it. And you really, really understand the power when you go back to trying to write things in html. It’s so incredibly fast, and requires so little thought about the mechanics of formatting and other annoying details.
One of the nice things using a wiki has caused/allowed me to do is to start keeping better notes about technical tips and hacks, as I figure them out. More and more I’m finding that I’m hitting the same problem multiple times, and I always remember that I was able to fix it thorugh some obscure hack, but don’t exactly remember many of the details. My wiki has already saved my butt several times on that front. Part of the experience has been learning when I need to write something down, and what I should put down about it. I’m hoping this is a practice I can keep up with, as well as I’m hoping to eventually make my notes open, so others might benefit as well.