The Uncertainty Mindset 2019-2020

As of December 2020, there did not appear to be a straightforward way to host a flat file static website with automatically generated internal bidirectional links—this is a duct tape and baling wire solution.

Digital gardens go nearly all the way, and the Ness Labs process overview was extremely helpful. I stole heaps of stuff, including the basic idea, from there. (Thanks, Anne-Laure!)

But I wanted a structural separation between issue pages and topic pages, and to have bidirectional linking between them. So this is what I did:

1. Create an instance of TiddlyWiki (version 5.1.23)
2. Install plugins:
   1. Blink (from Stroll): transclusion and bidirectional linking
   2. Edit-CompText: entry completion
   3. JSZip: static HTML export
   4. Relink: auto-update of renamed entries
3. Create issue pages, marking up each issue page with topics to create normal forward links to topic pages.
4. Create topic pages (backlinks to issue pages are automatically generated by Blink). Enrich topic pages with additional content. (That took an incredibly long time; what a pain.)
5. To convert to a read-only version, export static HTML and adjust styling (with CSS)—the Ness Labs how-to on this is great.
6. Upload to Github and commit.

Tool notes: TiddlyWiki is appropriate technology and I endorse it—it is simple, quick to learn, and easily extensible when extension is required. I briefly considered and rejected the idea of creating an Obsidian vault and turning that into a Blot site (no automatic bidirectional linking). I did not want to use Roam.