(*1) My Psybertron blog “What, Why and How do we Know?” has over 25 years of content on WordPress. A fork in development of that technology platform is making support increasingly problematic (see post note below), so whilst I am maintaining that content on-line, I am looking for alternatives to preserve its value and accessibility as well as continue future blogging on SubStack. In that 25 years I have often remarked that blogging notes was very similar to the paper-slips or index-card techniques used by various authors to create and organise their semantic web of complex ideas and their relationships into manageable evolving texts. Robert Pirsig’s story of how he wrote both “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Lila” is one clear example. That technique however has a name – “Zettelkasten” – German for note-box, and unsurprisingly these days there are electronic tools that support it. Not for the first time, I’m in the process of capturing the semantic-web of my own thinking and writing to date, in the “Obsidian” tool.

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I’m contemplating simply switching all you historical followers and commenters here directly over to the new channel, but feel free to subscribe there directly.

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Post Note: I’m not killing my WordPress instances, just looking for insurance for valuable content and off-ramps if things go completely pear-shaped. I’ll keep them live even if I reduce dependency for now.

The problems with WordPress are serious according to founder Matt Mullenweg. Here his post on 23 years of WordPress just a couple of days ago, a plea for the “internecine warfare” to cease. It’s in danger of killing WordPress, and hurting real people in the process, and for what? (And – incidentally – in his very next post – he points to the calming value of 2 minutes of Alan Watts. Wonder if Matt knows the Watts / Pirsig Zen connection – the Robert Pirsig Association also runs on WordPress. Perhaps the internecine war could benefit from Sun Tzu?)

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