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My workflow in writing and maintaining this wiki

The entire wiki is open source on GitHub. Everything is authored with markdown. On every commit, Vercel that is hooked up to the GitHub repo runs Docusaurus and new version of wiki is published.

The order of items in sidebar is alphabetical. Previously I used GitBook for publishing and that used SUMMARY.md file for custom order of items in sidebar.

I write and edit all the markdown files in this wiki from Sublime Text with Vim mode.

I use this Alfred workflow to quickly search through all the .md files that are found in this wiki.

This workflow also searches through all folders in this wiki and lets me create new folders inside those folders or create new entries (md files) inside the folders.

I also wrote a comment that goes in more detail over the ways I update the wiki.

I use Alfred My Mind to search for wiki entry to open/share. I plan to improve this system a lot going forward.

Editing on iOS​

I open the docs part of the GitHub repo folder in Obsidian Mobile. This lets me edit the wiki on the go. Most times I write messages to myself on Telegram and transfer it later to my wiki on mac.

Making notes on books/papers​

When reading books/papers, I annotate PDF files with Preview and ePub files with Books app. Once I read the book/paper I transfer the annotations to the markdown file and connect the file to wiki. I often write a review on Goodreads and add the review and notes I made to books.

This system needs improvement though and I want to try using Readwise and more automation for both reading things more efficiently and taking notes.

Using this wiki​

Now that I can edit this wiki and extend it at the speed of a thought. I can open any of the wiki entries in seconds by searching for the file I need with Alfred My Mind.

And anyone who owns Alfred can download the workflow and search through the wiki too. Outside of that, GitBook also provides a pretty neat search in the wiki itself. In there you can make textual queries too and files where the queried text is will be shown.

Wiki reference​

I try to structure everything inside this wiki as understandable and readable by anyone. Sometimes I use abbreviations, so if you find anything confusing in this wiki, read here and if it's still confusing, ask a question on GitHub

Abbreviations​

  • LA = Learn Anything
  • KM = Keyboard Maestro. Will often reference KM macros I made.
  • repo = GitHub repository
  • bound to .. = may say things like bound to v + r which means that I created an action that activates when I hold v key and then press r. For how that works read this.

Nearly every page in the wiki has a ## Links section. Those are essentially my bookmarks. I add a year in brackets to links like (2017) which stands for the year the resource be it article/video/.. was published in.

Alfred My Mind​

I wrote an Alfred workflow that as the name suggests, acts as my second brain that I use to quickly access anything I have indexed for myself. I share it because I wish other people took this idea and made their own Alfred My Mind or a Knowledge wiki but for their own use. Sharing knowledge and tools like that is very powerful and makes a big difference. As I use and reuse other people's work and knowledge many times a day. It never hurts to add to the mix.

I want to visualize knowledge and thoughts and ideas I have and share most of these things with other people through this wiki, the longer articles I write, the YouTube videos I make and of course finally through the code I write to make useful tools, apps and interactive visualizations that all can use and enjoy.

Future improvements​

I want to:

  1. Have better access to notes/links. Alfred My Mind is lacking. I want faster access.
  2. The graph you see on main page with nodes and connections (generated by Obsidian), I want it on the web and interactive and up to date.
  3. Improve the search in here with Docusaurus. Don't like it currently and some pages like rust libraries are not even being indexed for being too big.
  4. Be more active in sharing my knowledge in smaller tidbits. Simon Willison’s Weblog is amazing example of this. So many TILs on so many topics. I want all my useful knowledge and references indexed digitally.

Similar wikis I liked​

Wiki software​

  • Docusaurus
  • GitBook
  • Oscean - Flow-based serverless wiki.
  • WeeWiki - Wee little wiki engine used to generate personal wikis and mind maps.
  • Dnote - Simple personal knowledge base.
  • Instiki - Basic wiki clone so pretty and easy to set up, you’ll wonder if it’s really a wiki.

Notes​