Structure in the flow

I’ve gone through many posts along the lines of “oh I haven’t got time for this blog”, here’s another. Well in fact it’s the last one, as I won’t see this as a “blog” anymore. Let’s call this a “website”, like in the good old days when everything was edited manually and the concept of “timeline” wasn’t as important (Why would content like this be ordered chronologically anyway? It was trendy, I guess…). I’ve thought about doing this for a while, found a few hours to do it this morning, so here we go!

I’m still using WordPress, as it’s a good content management system anyway. Also, it’ll still allow for changes to be tracked in the sidebar.

I also changed the theme to something slightly more traditional; I find it easier on the eyes. It’s my first blog’s theme, in fact.

It’s been quite a while since the last update. This is due to changes in my priorities, as I’m beginning a master degree in computer science at Université de Montréal. More precisely, I’ll be studying machine learning.

Given a bunch of factors, summarizable as “not enough new content to justify having three blogs”, I’ve decided to merge my programming, PKM and personal blogs into one (this one — the other two will now point here).

For those suscribed to the original feed for Structure in the flow (ie. this blog), you can keep the old feed URL, it now points to the original (and eventually new) entries tagged with “pkm”.

In the two years preceding my entrance to university, I had spent some time learning about AI and neurosciences, but never delved really deep. In university, having even less free time, I focused more on software engineering. Ever since I’ve wanted to get back to the topic. Lately, pondering about how to fit that into my schedule, I thought this blog will be a perfect pretext: explore the topics and write about interesting things I stumble on along the way.

So I’m still thinking of how to approach this in a structured manner. Yet, sometimes idly browsing YouTube brings amazing results. I was looking for environments in which to test small neural networks “hello world”-equivalent programs and discovered all sorts of interesting videos, only tangentially related, but hey, that’s the whole point of “stumbling upon”, right?

First there was this generative art piece. This reminds me of fractals, though the principle is quite different (the artist says he’s trying to emulate the principle behind butterfly wings patterns ). If you like Winamp/WMP/iTunes visualizations, then try searching for “generative art” on YouTube. Further tangential wanderings led to these:

• Custom music visualization
• Marius Watz
• John Maeda
• San Base

Note: this applied to my old “programming blog”, which at the time was distinct from this one.

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This blog seems to follow a very irregular pattern of activity, with lone posts here and there through time.

I think I’ll be changing the post format as I did for my personal knowledge management blog, gradually: more “here’s something interesting” posts, and perhaps even revisions to old posts with a changelog.

The idea behind this is to lower the amount of time required to post something, obviously, which makes my subconscious less prone to “repressing” the blog’s existence due to the otherwise huge blocks of contiguous time needed to keep it afloat.

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On another note, I also just changed the landing page for fsavard.com, to point to the different websites on the domain. Having 3 blogs might seem a little bit overkill when you’re only posting once in a while, but they are of very distinct nature, so merging them wouldn’t make much sense from a readership perspective. I’ll probably make a merged RSS feed at some point, though.

This blog seems to suffer from severe parental attention deficit, lately. The cause, I believe, is in the format: I’ve (consciously or not) chosen a limiting post format. I attacked broad personal knowledge management questions with what I could find in my own experience (mostly).

Problem is, that experience is, err, ever expanding, but also limited. Some topics I didn’t want to cover as I felt I did not have a sufficiently broad understanding and view of.

Generally speaking, here’s the new approach:

• I’ll now mostly have shorter posts focusing more specifically on, say, a given software tool, instead of a whole category at a time. There’ll be more “here’s something interesting” posts.
  • Ergo, I’ll touch topics which wouldn’t otherwise appear here, due to aforementioned lack of broad experience with said topics
• Long posts will start to evolve, and significant changes to a past post will be mentionned in the feed in the form of a short new entry.

Transformation to something akin to a wiki

Those changes don’t mean I won’t aggregate information in the old “overview” format, which I believe is better in the long run as it give’s a bird’s eye view of a topic, allowing to see the forest then the trees (top-down), not the other way around. That’s why I’ll start modifying old posts as relevant new tools appear and new points come to my mind, similar in principle to a “normal web site” (ie. non blog, set-of-page) or a wiki. The timeline aspect isn’t as important for these articles, anyway.

A consequence of changing old posts is that these changes won’t directly appear in the RSS feed. Instead, short blog posts (in RSS) will now simply draw attention to significant changes on pages: new tools that appeared, new explanations, etc.

Each “evolving” post will also be equiped with a Changelog section, in which I manually enter a description of the change. That way, if you’ve already read the page you’ll know what’s new. Also, context for comments prior to a change will still be available (I’ll try to add an “editor’s note” to previous comments if context changes real bad).

Side note (technical): I’ve yet to find a WordPress plugin that allows me to actually show the differences (à la UNIX diff) between two post versions.

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My goal by doing this reorientation is to lower the “barrier to entry” for a post, meaning I won’t have to write for a few hours, consecutive blocks of which are hard to come by Furthermore, incremental changes make more sense for broad posts.