ideas VS Grav

I wrote some notes about this of what I want in my "life engine":

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#5-life-engine

I never got into the quantified self but I did want a portal (such as similar to the Yahoo! and Excite.com days) in the early 2000s. of personal details that I can take actions on.

Then a few years later I wrote about "life situational awareness apps"

I want my phone and desktop computer system try to have widgets for "accommodation", "travel", "food".

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3#59-life-indicators---sit...

I did write a question generator feed dashboard written in Electron that let you snap in data collectors that would let you save records of stock purchases and facts about yourself such as your salary. The idea is that you could get advice based on what you answer.

https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents

https://github.com/samsquire/living-documents-library (the app repository)

Unfortunately it's probably not buildable and I forgot to take screenshots or videos.

My blogging/journalling setup is simple.

I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com

I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

Thanks for posting this Ask HN question.

I journal ideas and thoughts about computers and software. I am interested in software architecture, parallelism, async, coroutines, database internals, programming language implementation, software design and the web.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4 <-- this is recent but needs editing

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas5 <-- this is what I'm working on now

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://github.com/samsquire/blog <-- thoughts I want to write about, but incomplete

I use README.md on GitHub and create a heading at the bottom for each entry. I use Typora on Windows or the GitHub web interface to edit.

In 2013 I wrote about "game interfaces for work" where work interfaces should act like games. Real time strategy games make you feel empowered, if you could queue up real work in a units runqueue. Of course you'll have actions besides "build" and "attack" to map to the richness of the world.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#71-gaming-interfaces-for-...

Even the mouse is a database

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#12-the-package-manager-pa...

I call these branching libraries.

Definition: Use one kind of thing as another kind of thing.

Given X do Y

Generics gets us some of the way to what we want.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#48-branching-libraries

Using a database as a spreadsheet or a spreadsheet as a database, using a spreadsheet as a functional programming language or bash pipeline editor with each cell being the output of that pipeline step. Or reactive programming with spreadsheets.

I am trying to solve the expression problem. To introduce a new thing into an old thing you typically need to implement hundreds of functions on an interface.

Remember that all science, mathematics, theology comes from understanding an idea. So ideas are valuable to society. If you think they're worthless, then I don't want your ideas, I want people in academia and industry to have good ideas and push society forward. Science, mathematics, theories, research, theology all are built on the shoulders of giants, with ideas that provide foundations of truth to push society forward.

The more ideas you have and the more you work on them the more you grow as a person. I also work on building software to put my ideas to the test.

I journal/blog all my computer and technology related ideas on GitHub out in the open.

I have published 700+ ideas on GitHub. I create a repository called "ideas" then I journal 100-400 ideas using markdown and then create a new repository and repeat. They're all in markdown and written as simple numbered markdown headings and a few one paragraph to a page of notes. They should be enough to understand the idea and do something with it. I reread my ideas repeatedly and I uncover new ideas from my existing ideas. Ideas should be built on and improved precept by precept.

For reference, they're about software design, software architecture, parallelism, multithreading, efficiency, growth, futurism, progress.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas <- 2013

I am more likely to journal and blog if the friction to creating a post is as simple as opening a document and writing. The important part of journalling or note software is that you actually create notes. I did use Hetzner to run a Wordpress blog but it had an overhead of server expenses and keeping Wordpress up-to-date.

I don't want my data trapped in a proprietary system where it is difficult to export, so I use plaintext. I looked into Publii [1] but I prefer my current plaintext setup. Today I journal software ideas, computer ideas, startup ideas and community ideas on GitHub in the open, as README.md files. My journal is all public on GitHub at the following links. There are over 550+ journal entries, I am sure you shall enjoy them.

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas2

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4

https://github.com/samsquire/startups

https://getpublii.com/

I wrote a living document interface. Nowadays it's probably similar to notion.

The idea was you could write code into it and see all the data structures of the code you wrote. There's a screencast and the code is available but broken. It's written in Angular 1. There was a cool feature where you could select different things on the screen for searching for an operation for them to merge them together.

https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3064a94d00812c1373c4eb3b2...

https://github.com/samsquire/ideas#4-living-documents

There are flat-file CMSes (content management systems) like Grav: https://getgrav.org/

I guess, in some vague/broad sense, config-as-code systems also implement something similar? Maybe even OpenAPI schemas could count to some degree...?

In the old days, the "semantic web" movement was an attempt to make more webpages both human- and machine-readable indefinitely by tagging them with proper schema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework. Even Google was on board for a while, but I guess it never saw much uptake. As far as I can tell it's basically dead now, both because of non-semantic HTML (everything as a React div), general laziness, and LLMs being able to parse things loosely.

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Side thoughts...

Philosophically, I don't know that capturing raw data alone as files is really sufficient to capture the nuances of any particular experience, or the overall zeitgeist of an era. You can archive Geocities pages, but that doesn't really capture the novelty and indie-ness of that era. Similarly, you can save TikTok videos, but absent the cultural environment that created them (and a faithful recreation of the recommendation algorithm), they wouldn't really show future archaeologists how teenagers today lived.

I worked for a natural history museum for a while, and while we were there, one of the interesting questions (well, to me anyway) was whether our web content was in and of itself worth preserving as a cultural artifact -- both so that future generations can see what exhibits were interesting/apropos for the cultures of our times, but also so they could see how our generation found out about those exhibitions to begin with (who knows what the Web will morph into 50 years later). It wasn't enough to simply save the HTML of our web pages, both because they tie into various other APIs and databases (like zoological collections) and because some were interactive experiences, like games designed to be played with a mouse (before phones were popular), or phone chatbots with some of our specimens. To really capture the experience authentically would've required emulating not just our tech stacks and devices, among other things.

Like for the earlier Geocities example, sure you could just save the old HTML and render it with a modern browser, but that's not the same as something like https://oldweb.today/?browser=ns3-mac#http://geocities.com/ , which emulates the whole OS and browser too. And that still isn't the same as having to sit in front of a tiny CRT and wait minutes for everything to download over a 14.4k modem, only to be interrupted when mom had to make a call.

I guess that's a longwinded of critiquing "file over app": It only makes sense for things that are originally files/documents to begin with. Much of our lives now are not flat docs but "experiences" that take much more thought and effort to archive. If the goal is truly to preserve that posterity, it's not enough to just archive their raw data, but to develop ways to record and later emulate entire experiences, both technological and cultural. It ain't easy!

I took a more traditional approach, focusing on something that's "good enough", which in my case was a cheap VPS and an install of Grav: https://getgrav.org/

Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).

All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least a bit less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.

The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!

I'd check out Grav. https://getgrav.org/

Also, there is a CMS called Grav. Both Gravity and Grav use a very similar (but not identical) font for their logo.

I would use a flat file cms like https://getgrav.org