I see now why all the really cool coders have 3-4 articles on their websites. The internet has got us used to sharing our thoughts somehow. But most of these are not worth sharing, really. Or could be just shared on bird-site or whatever.
I have done and written a lot of stuff. But I, in fact, tend to throw it all away eventually: websites get deleted, programs (even ones I've spent days and weeks worth of effort on!) get lost (and are never run again). And among all that stuff is, actually, a plenty of things worth posting somewhere, things that could help or inspire others (and make me look cool, he-he)
Now I'm forcing myself to learn to preserve it all somehow (especially the sources). And also to somehow do incremental improvements instead of starting over every time (with this website I started all over, for instance)
It feels weird, because I've always appreciated the data and always thought that information should be preserved somehow. But I manage to f*ck up the data every time. I tend to even forget names and phone numbers.
Most of the information nowadays is stored in some closed, "proprietary" form. Even the plain text data - it is often encoded into some sort of a database. And, even worse, it is often stored in a "cloud", on someone else's computer. Or even on a self-hosted service/app - it is still in some obscure format.
Micro$oft Word file or OpenOffice file, while they have formatting and tables and other cool stuff, are still "special" files, that need a special app to view them. But they still hold mostly text - and it's sort of irritating for me.
"Closed" formats are perfectly fine, don't get me wrong. They allow for metadata, for some performance benefits and stuff. Just bad for me: I tend to chose momentary convenience, and then, even if there is some form of backup/export option, that exported data just lays around until I lose it, it is not immediately reusable, takes some effort to reimport or parse.
By the way, that is the main reason I prefer obsidian over cherryTree and likes to take notes - the data is viewable via any text editor. That is why I use markdown for content of this site, too.
I believe, there existed some culture of information in the BBS ages (or maybe it still exists, but I'm not trained for it). An HTML article with images and stuff is cool, but its main content is text still. A PDF document describing a piece of software is great, but still text - text I can't open without shiny new piece of software. And text - well, it does not require many resources to read, in fact it is the same as it was in the teletype times.
Movies, books and music. For these universal formats exist. Widely recognized and supported, there are even standalone devices that play movies and music. Players, readers and TVs. That is why I have all my music, movies and books stored as files.
When I buy a musical album (I sometimes do, trust me, hehehe) - I usually rip it to preserve. When I buy it online - I only do from likes of bandcamp, that allows you to download music you've just bought. Because if the service only allows to play music you bought (not to have it) - the service will eventually stop working and it is lost. Happened before, will always happen. I never buy books from services that only allow to read them in their own app, because the app will stop working eventually.
Feels like with ubiquitous internet presence it becomes harder and harder to preserve information with each year. Everything is cloud-based ("you don't need to install an app, you have a web app"), everything requires to be online. Internet is fast, bandwidth is unlimited, so instead of downloading stuff we "stream" it (essentially downloading it over and over again.)
Maybe I'm just getting old.