My personal wiki setup

• [[org-mode]], [[org-roam]] and [[org-publish]]

See also: [[Flock]]. (I should merge these pages?)

I started with just org-mode and org-publish. As of [[March 2020]], I started using org-roam, too.

This has been a nice progression. Using just plain org-mode got me started with minimal effort. Then org-roam has been a great extra layer on top, when I realised I wanted more to follow the [[zettelkasten]]/[[tiddler]] approach of smaller notes linked together. It provides a list of backlinks, as well as basic graphing/visualisation, so it goes some way to helping find the constellations, too.

How it meets my requirements

As per [[My personal wiki requirements]].

Low-friction writing

I am very tied to text-editing in Emacs (with vi bindings), so big win here so far. To be honest I’m not a huge fan of org-mode markup for some reason, it’s a bit ugly in places (I mean #+BEGIN_QUOTE, what the hell kind of syntax is that??), but I’m familiar with it and of course it integrates very nicely into Emacs.

Low-friction connections

org-roam makes it very easy to link between notes.

Finding [[constellations]]

org-roam has backlinks and graphing capability. To be honest, although I’ve kicked the tires, I haven’t made much active use of the sense-making features yet though.

[[org-roam-ui]] adds a lovely graphical layer on top of org-roam.

Publishing capabilities

With org-publish you can pretty easily (requires a bit of [[config]]) output the static HTML. org-roam taught me the nice idea of adding extra hook as well for org-publish, and has one for pulling in all your backlinks. I may switch to ox-hugo at some point, for improved publishing.

See my [[personal wiki config]] for some config bits and pieces.

Plain-text

Yep.

Backed by version control

Yep - I use git.

Local-first

I can write in org and org-roam without any connection. If I want to pull in some links then I need connection, but I can just use the title.

Libre software and longevity

Indeed so. Emacs, org, they’re FOSS++ and have stood the test of time much longer than most. org-roam is a new kid, very active at the moment, but to be seen how long it sticks around. But if org-roam vanished, I’d just lose some features, not all of my thoughts and ideas. All my plain-text would still be right there.

Interwiki linking

I added simple incoming [[webmention]] support to enable comments ([[Receiving webmentions on my digital garden]]).

I syndicate copies of all my pages to [[Anagora]]. ([[2021-11-28]])

Misc

I like this as an approach because it uses and leverages all of the existing functionality of the Emacs ecosystem. I’m not learning a new tool (although of course it was a new tool to me at one point, and I wouldn’t really recommend all this to someone not already familiar with Emacs, it’s a steep learning curve - worth it though!).

Could be improved

• search ing the HTML version. Not a big deal to be honest - I can search my local version easily enough, so it would only really be useful if I want other people to be able to search. Or sometimes I do want to search just so I can share a specific page with someone. (At the moment I go to /sitemap and that works well enough though). If I want improved publishing, I could use ox-hugo. Lately I just search on [[Anagora]].
• structured data, e.g. I can see the list of [[books]] I’ve read begging for something more structured than plain text, or the big old list of [[tracks]]. But let’s see how we go. I’m not trying to build a database.
• could mark it up with microformats…
• transclusion could perhaps be nice, or some of that block include stuff Roam has. In org-roam itself, some discussion here https://github.com/jethrokuan/org-roam/issues/317. fedwiki/tiddlywiki style transclusion in the publish would also be nice. A mention of that here: https://github.com/jethrokuan/org-roam/pull/263.
• an easy to navigate edit history / permalinks - it doesn’t affect my own usage of the wiki, and I do have it versioned in git, but my URLs aren’t very cool - other people might experience linkrot and struggle to see history

• misc [[Wiki itches]].