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Attention conservation notice: New fascination of a new blogger
I recently came to know about a fascinating idea of making an online Garden in Indie Blogging. An online garden is a personal space on the internet where the online presence of the user--or online gardener--grows with time in a well-structured manner. It is similar to a bio garden but instead of prospering in terms of plants, it's the online presence that evolves. Besides the general definition--which you can find here--it can be a place for me to dump my knowledge and keep track of it.
Although I found the concept of an online garden a few weeks ago in the blogging community, I already have had it for almost 6 months now. It was Cosma Shalizi through whom I got this idea as he has an enormously big database in terms of notebooks. You can say his garden is the size of a forest. So following his idea I built the same. Similar to Cosma, my garden is in the form of notebooks in which I write about the topics I read. For example, if I read about the biological laws of evolution, I will put it in a notebook named biological laws. With time, if I find more interesting laws I will add to it.
Keeping the information organized in the notebook form is very convenient but searching a specific information is not. Oftentimes, I forget the name of the notebook in which I noted down the information previously and to find the notebook I need to dig through the database or simply give up if I am in a hurry. So one solution to this problem, I found, is building my own Wikipedia. Regarding this solution, I read many methods to make a Wikipedia and the one I finalized is Dokuwiki.
Setting up Dokuwiki was relatively easy--just download it and configure apache2 to run the ".php" script. Configuring apache2 to do anything is never straight forward but I made it work. I chose a minimal template to remove the clutter and let it look simple. On top of that, I found that it supports the ".markdown" format and I could import/convert all my notebooks in DokuWiki format.
Finally, to make it accessible online, I am planning to set up self-hosting on a new toy of mine, Raspberry Pi 5. However, I have doubts as well, whether it will be any better than notebooks because my notebooks look very cute to read. Anyway, I am still working on it and I will write about it once I finish setting it up.
After several attempts and multiple consequent failures, finally my encyclopedia is online. You can check it here
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Posted at: Sun, 09 Feb 2025 20:10 GMT
category: /weblog/posts