springtime wiki
a small, slow, personal wiki — a garden of pages tended over time.
Welcome to springtime wiki — a template for a personal, single-author wiki. Every page here is an invitation to plant, tend, and revisit. Everything is editable; nothing is ever finished.
This wiki is a human-centered alternative to the stream. It is a garden of pages, connected by internal links and open standards, based on the principles of owning your own domain and using it as your primary identity, publishing on your own site first, and owning your content. When you write something on the web, it should belong to you, not to a platform.
Pages here are for notes, projects, reading logs, essays in progress, recipes worth keeping, people you've met, and anything else that benefits from being written down and linked together. Short pages are fine. Stubs are welcome. Red links are invitations.
Principles
A few house rules for how this wiki is kept. Borrowed, adapted, and pruned from the IndieWeb community.
- Own your words. Pages live on a domain you control. If a platform shuts down, the garden doesn't.
- Write messy, revise later. The first version of a page is allowed to be rough. That's what page history is for.
- Link generously. Every page wants neighbours. A wiki without internal links is a plot with no paths.
- Stubs are allowed. A three-sentence page is still a page. Red links are invitations to write, not failures.
- Slow over fast. No comments, no feeds chasing attention. A long walk, not a timeline scroll.
- Compost the old. Revise without guilt. Old revisions rest in the history; the top of the page is always free to change.
Getting started
If you're forking this template, the first pages worth planting are usually:
To plant first
- About — who you are and why this wiki exists
- Now — what you're focused on this season
- Colophon — how this wiki is built
- Reading list
Good habits
- Link out from every new page to at least one other
- Tag pages as you go — tags are free
- Keep a changelog page; it ages well
- Don't delete — archive or rewrite instead
Recently tended
Pages edited in the last fortnight. See also: full recent changes · RSS feed.
- Apr 18 edit On keeping a commonplace book — untangled the note-taking system
- Apr 14 edit Sourdough log — loaf #37, hydration notes
- Apr 11 new Things I learned from my grandmother
- Apr 07 stub Tiny essays on walking — started, barely a paragraph
- Apr 03 edit Reading notes: A Pattern Language — reorganised by pattern number
- Mar 30 new Letters I haven't sent
Garden beds
Pages on this wiki are loosely sorted into the following categories. You can also browse by tag, by date, or by last edited.
Notes & essays
- Reading notes — 38 pages
- Commonplace book — 62 pages
- Essays in progress — 11 pages
- Quotes worth keeping — 9 pages
Making & doing
- Projects — 14 pages
- Kitchen log — 27 pages
- Code experiments — 18 pages
- Workshop notes
People & places
- People I've met — 22 pages
- Neighbourhood walks — 8 pages
- Letters — 5 pages
- Travel log
Maintenance
- Changelog
- To-do — 19 open
- Stubs to expand — 24
- Orphan pages — 3
Example page
Here's what a typical wiki page looks like, so you can see the layout conventions at work.
On keeping a commonplace book
A commonplace book is a personal collection of things worth keeping — passages, ideas, recipes, scraps of overheard conversation. It is older than the printed book itself, and it has survived every technology shift since, because the underlying need is human: we read and hear more than we can remember, and writing it down lets us find it again.
My commonplace book lives here on this wiki, split across quotes, reading notes, and marginalia. The trick, I've found, is to rewrite rather than copy — the act of rephrasing is what makes something yours.
In other gardens
Personal wikis and digital gardens are a tradition, not an invention. A few neighbours worth visiting:
- Maggie Appleton's garden — patterns for digital gardens
- Andy Matuschak's notes — public evergreen notes
- Tom Critchlow's wiki — one of the earliest personal wikis in this tradition
- The IndieWeb wiki — community, principles, building blocks
If you keep a public wiki, let me know — I'll add you here.