I might plan another redesign of how I keep little bits of tech knowledge that I occasionally need to refer back to.

I’ve been posting them here as blog posts, but I don’t love this way of doing things. It’s always a little hard to recall them and sometimes what I learn is in itself a small part of something larger, and there’s always that decision about whether to put it in it’s own blog post. But I think the biggest issue is that, although I talk about technology here, it’s not really a tech blog per si. So seeing bits of tech know-how interspersed with what I usually post here is a little strange, or at least it does to me.

Several months ago I tried keeping this knowledge in a wiki. But because I never finished setting up the wiki software — making sure backups are working, for example — I never got to the point where I was comfortable putting in stuff that I know won’t be lost. For this reason, I never kept the wiki up to date which, in turn, made it useless as a knowledge base. I eventually scrapped it and moved most of that knowledge here.

I’m going to try the wiki-styled approach again as it seems like a better way to organise and present this knowledge. The difference this time is that I won’t be running wiki software. I’d like to keep the cost and maintenance of this system as low as possible while still being confident that what I write there won’t be lost. Stories about how I found a piece of knowledge (if any) will still be posted here, as it seems like a better venue for that (including how I found the knowledge along with the knowledge itself was another thing I was falling out of love with).

As to how this wiki-style approach would work, I’m not quite yet. I think what I’ll try first is to move it all into into a series of markdown files managed by Git. This can be hosted with GitHub and published online using Hugo and GitHub Pages. I’ll start with a single “source” repository with only the markdown files. The “published” version will probably go into another repository, just to keep all the Hugo stuff away from the content. Setting up publishing to GitHub Pages may take a bit of time, but I think it’s something that I’ll want pretty soon, as I get a lot of utility referencing this with a browser.

An alternative is using an Obsidian and their web publishing feature. That would mean less work to do up-front but their web publishing add-on is pretty expensive, so I rather avoid this until I know that the Git approach won’t work.

In any case, I’ll let you know how it all goes.