Table of Contents
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“Ramblings” is good tho, keep that. Accurately describes all the shit that comes out of your mouth.
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~PiousLittleChristianGirl, nice as always.
Ramblings is the “wiki” section of ultracomfy.net. I use ultracomfy.net as a homepage for pretty much all things (including private stuff), but “Ramblings” refers specifically to the wiki-style content dedicated to documenting my impressions and thoughts on - well - everything I feel like writing about. Ramblings started as an idea a few years back, “what if I had my own personal wiki where I could note down my thoughts on topics?” because I always kept forgetting my thoughts and, thus, frequently came to conclusions which I later had to work my way back to because I did not remember how I got to that conclusion. The idea was to cut the “conclusion reconstruction” part by writing it all down to allow to quickly get back to points in a thought I had previously been in. Reconstructing thoughts I previously had would be particularly difficult when my opinion or my thoughts on a thing had actually changed in the meantime, making it impossible to actually reconstruct the original reasoning. With a wiki I would always have a clear line of argument laid out as the baseline and could track changes in my mind just by comparing how my perception of a topic had advanced.
For years this is how it went. Occasionally I would look into it and Google a few things like “local Wikipedia installation” or “Wikimedia alternative local installation” etc. but never tried it. Instead I tried using a txt file, aptly named “Positions.txt” in which I planned to write down thoughts and, well, positions. After writing the first thing that encouraged me to create the file I would save, close and then never open it again. In 2023, however, I grew really fond of RationalWiki and, because I had previously tried downloading offline copies of both Wikipedia and RationalWiki and tried it again that year, I got into MediaWiki and how that software works (exporting a MediaWiki is kind of involved and requires understanding of the software). Now, with a foot in the door of MediaWiki I started seriously looking into MediaWiki and how to install it locally, with several XAMPP installations and countless restarts, learning how to import plugins and whatnot and eventually failing at processing speed optimization and giving up because I didn't understand PHP and the versions and all the extensions and whatnot. I will figure it out one day, but that definitely wasn't the day.
Ultimately I decided I would give DokuWiki a shot. Not because I had anything for it or knew anything about it, but because it was championed as one of the most feature-rich MediaWiki alternatives. I literally stabbed into the dark. After struggling for hours because I kept ticking the “Update Files Only” checkmark which did NOT include the local server required to run the software and trying my darndest to figure out why this isn't working, it eventually *did* work, and splendidly so1). After fiddling around with basic DokuWiki markdown, settings, installing extensions, creating pages and so on and so forth I eventually decided to put it online so I could access and edit it easily from anywhere, show to other people anywhere anytime, to serve as a homepage (and I always kind of wanted a homepage - I used to have “ultracomfy.eu” before) and because it would be cloud based I would have no synchronization or compatibility problems. I don't need to run an exe or copy the DokuWiki folder onto all my devices so I can edit it on them. It's all in the browser, and pretty much everything has a browser. And, well, it allows me to show it to other people too, which is a plus. AND it serves as a homepage, but I already said this.
Mission Statement
Ramblings is primarily intended to help me understand how I understand things. While I am interested in understanding the things itself, the reason I write this down is to understand the Systems that lead me to understanding the patterns I recognize in the world. My brain is a mess of random thoughts and insides, and I need to systematically sort and order them to make sense of them and see connections. Ramblings aids in this by providing very rigid structure whilst leaving me exactly the amount of room I need to write out my thoughts. That is to say, thinking about things in the structure of a wiki helps me bring structure into the thoughts in my brain. Therefore:
Ramblings is not an encyclopedia. It is not trying to be a documentation or a recording of reality. Ramblings does not serve as a knowledge base. It is not a research resource. It does not attempt to cover fields and present information about them. Ramblings is meant to be a fast, accessible and dynamic directory to categorize and classify my ideas. Most pages will include a brief breakdown of the nature of the thing in question and as quickly as possible gloss over the general category the thing in question falls into, and will then move on directly to my thoughts on it.
For me, besides helping me remember things it is also meant to be 1) a form of self-expression, 2) a way to formalize my thoughts and to, 3), clean up in my brain and get things straight.